Recently, a total of 5 consecutive blocks (918864 to 918860) were mined on the Bitcoin blockchain in 20 minutes.
The Bitcoin community is perplexed by this dizzying pace. Blocks 91861 and 91860 were mined within just seconds of each other.
How did we mine 5 BTC blocks in less than 20 meters? The first two were 14 seconds apart from two different miners and were full blocks. Is this normal or a statistical outlier? Pure question. pic.twitter.com/cRwpDWeCaB
— Vinny Lingham (@VinnyLingham) October 13, 2025
Is it still normal?
Blocks are typically generated every 10 minutes. But earlier today, blocks were being generated on average about every 4 minutes.
Bitcoin enthusiast Dan McArdle argues that this unusually high Bitcoin production rate is not as unusual as it might seem.
“I don’t have the data in front of me, but anecdotally, I remember a number of events like that over the years,” McArdle explained.
Please note that the mining time for each block is random. Following an exponential distribution, the probability of being able to mine a block drops significantly very quickly.
For example, the probability that two blocks are minted just 14 seconds apart is only 1.4% per block. This is highly unlikely, but not impossible. As a result, a large number of blocks can be mined in a very short period of time, explains McArdle.
As McArdle explains, the recent block was “well within” the expected statistical Poisson distribution, which describes the probability of a large number of events occurring within a given time interval.
