The time study
Bitcoin Time
The clock that keeps time by the block, not the sun.
Ten laps of the ring make one block. Pac eats the waiting payments and the frightened fiat, and the bitcoin lands on the tenth.
Block height...blocks since the first block
Date....year, month, day a₿
Clock, 24 hour..:..hours and minutes into the day
Level...blocks until the next re-tune
How to read it
Bitcoin finds a block about every ten minutes. We count time in blocks. Nothing here looks at a wall clock or a calendar.
- A day is 144 blocks.
- A month is 28 days.
- A year is 364 days, which is 52,416 blocks.
- The clock reads hours and minutes inside the day. Each block is ten minutes.
The seconds are an honest guess. They count up from the moment the last block was found. When the next block is late the card breathes amber and says it is waiting.
Every 2,016 blocks the network re-tunes how hard blocks are to find, so they keep arriving about ten minutes apart. That count is the level.