The Bitcoin Glitch

The Bitcoin Glitch

A bug in the system?

There may be a bug in the Bitcoin infrastructure, and which might be causing the mining process to act incorrectly. This may have glitched the prices of bitcoin. The problem can be illustrated here, where we have a small delay between blocks (just 21 and 31 seconds between two consecutive blocks) and the creation of an extremely small block size (0.29kB):

Three blocks were thus produced within less than one minute.

The details

So something strange happened today (5 September 2018), and where the value of Bitcoin took two large drops (and fell over 5% in value). One drop happened just before 10am and then the other happened just before 11am:

Something very strange was happening and where the volumes of transactions in the blocks around the time to falls dropped to virtually zero:

The timing fits in almost exactly with the two glitches in the price of Bitcoin. We can see that one block (540029) only had 2.77 kB and another had 0.29kB. A typical block size is around 1.2MB. In Block 540038 we see only one transaction [here]:

And Block 540029 only had 10 transactions of a total size of 2.77kB [here]. The glitch seems to related to the miners coming up with a new block much quicker that they should have done:

The miners seemed to be triggering new blocks in just 20–30 seconds. A typical time between blocks is between 4 and 7 minutes, but we can see that the time between blocks is only 24 seconds (9:23:56 to 9:24:20), and it happened again later:

Something has gone wrong here, and the miners have triggered new blocks too quickly, and this has affect the value of bitcoins. There is a bug somewhere in the system, and the creation of a new block so quickly should not have happened. With these small blocks in the infrastructure, and with such a small difference between three consecutive blocks may been detected a fall in demand, and could have triggered the two falls. Otherwise there many be some manipulation of the market going on.