Block Interval

Each day's 1,440 minutes divided by the blocks it produced. Target is 10 minutes

Linear: equal distances are equal differences, so 0 to 100 takes the same height as 100 to 200. Logarithmic: equal distances are equal ratios, so each step up is a multiplication, and only positive values can be drawn. A series spanning several orders of magnitude, such as price or difficulty, shows its early years on a log axis and flattens into a line along the bottom on a linear one.

Short ranges plot one point per block, about one every ten minutes. Longer ranges plot one point per day, computed from every block in that day. How it is computed depends on the chart: some average, some total the day up, some are a ratio of the day's sums, and each chart says which. Either way a brief spike inside a day is smoothed away.

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Key factsCalculated from the points currently plotted, so they follow the range you pick. Zooming with the slider changes only what you see, not these.

over selected range

OverlaysExtra context drawn on top of the chart. Event markers are vertical lines at dated moments; a comparison series is a second set of numbers on its own axis at the right.

Event markers

Every 210,000 blocks, roughly every four years, the block subsidy halves. Fees are the other part of what a miner collects and do not halve with it. Four halvings have happened so far.

A BIP is a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal: a design document for a change to the protocol. These lines mark the dates that proposals such as SegWit and Taproot became active on the network.

Releases of Bitcoin Core, the software most nodes run. A release does not change consensus rules by itself, but it often changes what transactions a node will relay, which can show up in these charts.

Dated moments outside the protocol that moved the numbers: exchange failures, country-level bans, the first Ordinals inscriptions.

Comparison series

The BTC price in US dollars, drawn on its own axis on the right. Sampled every 4 days, which is all the source provides for the full history, so a range shorter than that cannot draw it. Price crosses six orders of magnitude, so it usually wants the logarithmic setting beside it.

The total size of the block chain on disk, growing as blocks are added. An archival node keeps every byte of it; a pruned one verifies the same blocks and then discards the old ones.

Compare with

one at a time: they share the right axis

RelatedCharts measuring the same thing or covering the same part of the network, for reading this one in context.

Address Type Count Address Type Share Avg Transaction Size Transaction Batching

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CSV and JSON take the selected range without overlay series. PNG captures the chart as it looks now.

About this metric

Definition

The time between one block and the next. Bitcoin targets ten minutes on average and holds that average by adjusting difficulty, but any single gap is close to random: a two-minute gap and a fifty-minute gap are both ordinary.

How it is measured

The difference between consecutive block header timestamps.

A timestamp is not a clock reading: consensus asks only two things of it, that it be later than the median of the previous eleven blocks, and no more than two hours ahead of network time. Nothing requires it to be later than the block immediately before it, which is why about one consecutive pair in 60 stored here runs backwards. That same two-hour allowance is what bounds how far back a pair can run, since the most negative a gap can be is roughly how far ahead the earlier block was permitted to be stamped: the largest backward step in this chain is just under two hours. They are plotted as found rather than cleaned, so this shows what the headers say rather than a corrected series.

The daily arm measures nothing of the sort: it divides each day's 1,440 minutes by the number of blocks that day produced, so a day of 144 blocks reads exactly 10 minutes. That is a different quantity from the average of a day's gaps, and it cannot show the spread within a day.

Measured from my own Bitcoin node. Methodology