Block Time Distribution
How long each block waited for the one before it. Ten minutes is the average, not the typical gap
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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About this metric
Definition
How long blocks wait for each other, as a distribution. Mining is memoryless, so short gaps are the most common and the tail runs long: the median is 6.9 minutes even though the average is ten.
How it is measured
The shortest bucket is always the largest one, which surprises people who expect a peak at ten minutes. Mining is memoryless: every hash attempt has the same tiny chance of winning whatever has happened already, so the waiting time is exponentially distributed and the most likely gap is a short one. Measured across every interval in the chain: the median is 6.9 minutes, 63.9% of blocks arrive in under ten minutes, 4.5% take more than half an hour and 0.3% take over an hour. An exponential distribution with a ten-minute mean predicts 63.2%, 5.0% and 0.25%, so the chain tracks the theory to within seven tenths of a percentage point. Miners choose their own timestamps, so a block can appear to arrive before its predecessor.
Measured from my own Bitcoin node. Methodology