Block arrivals in the Bitcoin blockchain

Understand

Bitcoin is a electronic payment system where payment transactions are verified and stored in a data structure called the blockchain.

• Bitcoin miners work individually to solve a computationally intensive problem, and with each solution a Bitcoin block is generated, resulting in a new arrival to the blockchain.
• The difficulty of the computational problem is updated every 2,016 blocks in order to control the rate at which blocks are generated.
• In the original Bitcoin paper, it was suggested that the blockchain arrivals occur according to a homogeneous Poisson process.