I would like to organize a celebration for the halving in my local community. Ideally, it would be something like New Year's Eve, but instead of counting bell tolls, we would count down blocks until we hit 840,000 and we would all go crazy when it comes in.
Now, this comes with a particular challenge: knowing exactly when the year ends is trivial, but knowing exactly when the halving will take place is another story. The stochastic nature of block hash discovery makes nailing down at which time will a certain block be found impossible. We can only estimate probabilities. On the limit, the average time between blocks it's 10min per block. But on shorter timespans, it can be wildly different.
I crunched some numbers by observing the empirical time between blocks from a node (bear in mind I took a sample of a few weeks. Different samples will yield different results). Here are my observations:
- When we are 12,960 blocks away from the halving (theoretically, 90 days), there is a 99% chance of the halving block appearing in the range of 86 days and 7 hours - 89 days and 16 hours. That's roughly a 82 hours interval.
- When we are 4,320 blocks away from the halving (theoretically, 30 days), there is a 99% chance of the halving block appearing in the range of 28 days and 7 hours - 30 days and 8 hours. That's roughly a 48 hours interval.
- When we are 1,008 blocks away from the halving (theoretically, 7 days), there is a 99% chance of the halving block appearing in the range of 6 days and 8 hours - 7 days and 7 hours. That's roughly a 23 hours interval.
Long story short: gathering people to catch the halving live is going to be an absolute headache planning wise. The specific time won't be in a reasonable range of a few hours until pretty much the day before.
Do you have any creative ideas on how this issue could be tackled? It would suck to not celebrate the halving live.