Bitcoin block time and fee estimates
How long since the last Bitcoin block?
The time since the last block, the odds of the next one soon, and what a payment costs right now.
Waiting for the block clock. It appears as soon as the feed answers.
How to read this
Bitcoin finds a block about every ten minutes, but only on average. Any single wait can be seconds or an hour.
The clock
The time since the newest block was found, counted from the moment Maketo first saw it. It resets the moment a new block arrives.
The odds
The chance a block arrives within a minute, five or ten, from now. They hardly change as the clock runs: a block is never due.
The fees
What a payment has to offer to be in the next block, within half an hour, within an hour, or whenever. A rate in sat/vB is satoshis per virtual byte of the payment's size.
Understanding
Bitcoin block time and fee estimates
What is a block?
A block is a batch of Bitcoin payments that miners add to the chain together. The network is tuned to find one about every ten minutes on average. A payment is final enough to rely on once it is in a block, and safer with each block built on top of it.
Why is the wait so uneven?
Blocks are found by chance, like a lottery that draws every moment, not by a timer. So the wait for the next one has no memory: after twenty minutes with nothing, the chance of a block in the next minute is the same as right after the last one. The odds on this page come from the average gap of recent blocks.
What does a payment cost?
A payment pays a fee for the room it takes up in a block, not for the amount it sends. Fees are quoted in sat/vB, satoshis per virtual byte, where a satoshi is a hundred-millionth of a Bitcoin. A simple payment is about 140 virtual bytes, so the page multiplies the rate by 140 and prices the result at the current Bitcoin price.
What are the next blocks?
The waiting room holds more payments than one block can carry, so miners take the highest fees first. The page sorts what is waiting into the blocks it would fill: the lowest fee that fits in each block and the middle fee in it. A payment that offers less than the lowest fee of block one waits for a later block.
Keep exploring
Source: Maketo’s own watch on Bitcoin’s blocks and waiting room.