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Key facts:
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On average, Ethereum blocks are mined every 20 seconds.
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To date only 628,900 blocks have been mined on the Bitcoin network.
Ethereum today mined 10 million blocks, reaching a significant goal for the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency. Information from blockchain explorer Etherscan shows that the 10 millionth block was successfully mined at exactly 01:22:13 PM (UTC).
Instead, only 628,900 Bitcoin blocks have been mined since its launch, which occurred on January 3, 2009. However, it takes much longer to produce the Bitcoin blocks, an average of about 10 minutes.
Launched in 2015, Ethereum was conceived as a decentralized “computing world”. This quickly rose to prominence in the top 100 of cryptocurrencies based on their market capitalization, before increasing in value in the 2017 market explosion. Currently, Ethereum is positioned as the second cryptocurrency, according to market capitalization.
In those days, CPUs were used to mine the cryptocurrency, before graphics cards took over the market. Since then, larger mining machines, known as ASICs, which are exclusive to cryptocurrency mining, have taken over. These machines have quickly extended the mining game.
As pointed out by Luit Hollander, in the History of the Ethereum Fork; to a consumer graphics card it would take 150 million years to compute the 15 zettahashes needed to mine 10 million blocks from Ethereum.
Cryptocurrency enthusiasts celebrated this achievement on social media, hoping to see Ethereum progress further, especially in terms of scalability.
Ethereum just hit 10M Blocks! The progress since the genesis block in 2015 is incredible. There are many exciting second-tier solutions to launch this year, such as keep_project, NuCypher, and SaleNetwork, that will help Ethereum scale even further. ” tweeted Aaron Hensaw, founder of blockchain infrastructure provider Bison Trails.
The Ethereum white paper initially envisioned that blocks be processed every 12.6 seconds. In practice, the time between blocks has proven to be slightly longer. Information from Bitinfocharts shows that on average the times between the blocks of ETH have become approximately every 20 seconds, with occasional rebounds of up to 50 seconds during periods of network congestion.
However, such an achievement will soon be a thing of the past, given that Ethereum will shift to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus model in the coming years.
Translated version of Greg Thomson’s article, published in Decrypt.
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