arXiv:1801.07447cs.CR
Block arrivals in the Bitcoin blockchain
Early discovery. Linked by one identifiable commenter. This paper is outside the main ranking; a mention is not an endorsement.
Abstract
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. Based on blockchain block arrival data and stochastic analysis of the block arrival process, we demonstrate that this is not the case. We present a refined mathematical model for block arrivals, focusing on both the block arrivals during a period of constant difficulty and how the difficulty level evolves over time.
It's definitely not a homogenous Poisson process, mainly because of the random changes to mining difficulty and propagation delays. There's a good paper here looking at block arrival times and fitting some different models - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.07447.pdf
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