<blockquote>
<p><strong>When will the Blockchain catch up?</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<p>There is no final catching up in the sense of having temporarily fallen behind some schedule or temporarily not keeping up with some flow of work.</p>
<p>A new block is added to the blockchain about every 10 minutes on average. There is a limit on the size of each block. Each node keeps their own pool of unconfirmed transactions called the mempool. Miners can take transactions from their mempool and add them to a block template they then work on.</p>
<p>You could say the blockchain is always catching up with the mempool. This is a process that will never end (until Bitcoin dies).</p>
<p>If the mempool is empty for a period of time, so are the block templates created in that period. In that sense you might say the blockchain has temporarily caught up with the flow of new transactions. But this catching up is not a significant event. The absence of anyone creating new unconfirmed transactions would be.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Satoshi. Stated something about when cpu processing power becomes more the transactions will show zero until the system catches up.</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<p>That doesn't make much sense to me. In particular the phrase &quot;transactions will show zero&quot; - Transactions are immutable data, the amount of money they show is always whatever amount the sender wanted to send. The amount never changes from zero to non-zero.</p>
<p>As processing power increases, the network difficulty is increased, but that only happens about every two weeks. You could say that the difficulty catches up with the processing power about every two weeks. You can estimate the date and time of next adjustment by examining the current block height. So far as I can tell this has nothing to do with any notion of transactions showing zero.</p>
<p>Additionally, I have good reasons to think  Satoshi Nakaomoto never wrote that or anything that vaguely resembles that.</p>
<p>I have searched the Nakamoto archives for variations of &quot;[when] cpu [processing]&quot; and &quot;transaction[s] [will] show[s] zero&quot; and &quot;catch up&quot;:</p>
<p>For example:</p>
<pre><code>$ grep -l -i -r &quot;catch.up&quot; *
emails/mike-hearn/2.md
emails/mike-hearn/3.md
whitepaper/en.md
whitepaper/es
</code></pre>
<p>None of those contain anything that resembles the statement you paraphrased.</p>
<p>Nakamoto wrote good clear lucid English, Everything I've read was much more clear and precise than the sentence in the question.</p>
<p>Its possible Nakamoto wrote a paragraph that used all the words in the paraphrase, or their synonyms, mixed with many other omitted words. If so, I can't find it.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-06-16T09:52:48.637Z
2023-06-16T10:26:34.370Z
2023-06-16T10:26:34.370Z
RedGrittyBrick
<p>Satoshi. Stated something about when cpu processing power becomes more the transactions will show zero until the system catches up. Is there any way to know when this will be?</p>

<blockchain>
When will the Blockchain catch up?
Sreed
# When will the Blockchain catch up?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2023-06-15)

Satoshi. Stated something about when cpu processing power becomes more the transactions will show zero until the system catches up. Is there any way to know when this will be?

**Tags:** blockchain


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## 1 answers

### Answer by username_1 on 2023-06-16. Score: 1

> **When will the Blockchain catch up?**

There is no final catching up in the sense of having temporarily fallen behind some schedule or temporarily not keeping up with some flow of work.

A new block is added to the blockchain about every 10 minutes on average. There is a limit on the size of each block. Each node keeps their own pool of unconfirmed transactions called the mempool. Miners can take transactions from their mempool and add them to a block template they then work on.

You could say the blockchain is always catching up with the mempool. This is a process that will never end (until Bitcoin dies).

If the mempool is empty for a period of time, so are the block templates created in that period. In that sense you might say the blockchain has temporarily caught up with the flow of new transactions. But this catching up is not a significant event. The absence of anyone creating new unconfirmed transactions would be.

> **Satoshi. Stated something about when cpu processing power becomes more the transactions will show zero until the system catches up.**

That doesn't make much sense to me. In particular the phrase "transactions will show zero" - Transactions are immutable data, the amount of money they show is always whatever amount the sender wanted to send. The amount never changes from zero to non-zero.

As processing power increases, the network difficulty is increased, but that only happens about every two weeks. You could say that the difficulty catches up with the processing power about every two weeks. You can estimate the date and time of next adjustment by examining the current block height. So far as I can tell this has nothing to do with any notion of transactions showing zero.

Additionally, I have good reasons to think Satoshi Nakaomoto never wrote that or anything that vaguely resembles that.

I have searched the Nakamoto archives for variations of "[when] cpu [processing]" and "transaction[s] [will] show[s] zero" and "catch up":

For example:

```
$ grep -l -i -r "catch.up" *
emails/mike-hearn/2.md
emails/mike-hearn/3.md
whitepaper/en.md
whitepaper/es

```

None of those contain anything that resembles the statement you paraphrased.

Nakamoto wrote good clear lucid English, Everything I've read was much more clear and precise than the sentence in the question.

Its possible Nakamoto wrote a paragraph that used all the words in the paraphrase, or their synonyms, mixed with many other omitted words. If so, I can't find it.


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