 Why was ten minutes decided as the amount of time necessary for a steady and diminishing flow for each block? How is it guaranteed that a solution will be found within exactly this amount of time? That's a great question, Dimitri. Let's break that into two parts. First part is, why was ten minutes decided as the amount of time necessary for each block? It was really a matter of balancing two competing interests. When you have a heartbeat in a blockchain consensus algorithm as you do in Bitcoin, you've got to account for the fact that miners may be operating anywhere on the planet and may even discover blocks simultaneously in different parts of the world, which then are transmitted to the network at different speeds and may arrive at different times for different nodes. Let's think of an example. Let's say you have a miner in Australia and you have a miner in Canada, and they both simultaneously and by accident discover a new block, and then their blocks start propagating across the Bitcoin network and across the world. Now, as you can imagine, they're going to eventually be transmitted to the entire network. However, for some part of the Bitcoin network, the nodes will hear the block coming from Canada first, whereas for another part of the Bitcoin network, the nodes will hear the blocks coming from Australia first. In that case, some of the nodes will assume that the Australian block was found first, some of the nodes will assume that the Canada block was found first. What that causes is a temporary and a normal fork. That type of fork happens on average about once a week. It's a one-block divergence in the network, and it's fixed with the very next block, because the chance of two nodes simultaneously again finding a block is unlikely. So, in the next block, one miner is going to find a new solution to a block and transmit it. If they built on top of the Canadian block, that's part of the chain. If they built on top of the Australian block, because that's the one they heard first, that's part of the chain. The other block that wasn't made part of the longer chain will simply get recycled with all of its transactions, and all of those transactions will be re-included in subsequent blocks. This type of one-block fork happens, as I said, on average once a week. Imagine if you shortened the target time for a block. You were producing blocks every five minutes, or every one minute, or even every 30 seconds. Some blockchains do that. Ethereum is a good example. Ethereum has 15 to 30 second blocks and uses proof-of-work similarly. But in the case of Ethereum, the consensus algorithm anticipates that you're going to have these so-called orphaned blocks occurring much, much more often. They use a different consensus algorithm to anticipate that. The original Bitcoin consensus algorithm was fine-tuned to reduce the number of orphaned blocks that will occur naturally, so as to avoid retransmissions and re-convergence of the network. It only happens once a week. If you made it every five minutes, it might happen four or five times a week. If you made it every one minute, it may happen several times a day. This was a careful tuning. It was assumed at the time that ten minutes would be perfectly adequate for clearing and settlement of transactions on Bitcoin, and for most use cases, in fact, it is. That's really the trade-off. That's the first part of your question. The second part of your question was, how is it guaranteed that a resolution will be found within exactly this amount of time? That has to do with what is known as difficulty retargeting. Every two weeks, or every 2016 blocks more accurately, the difficulty of the Bitcoin consensus algorithm is adjusted so as to converge on to ten minutes, meaning ten minutes is the fixed heartbeat time of the Bitcoin network, and what is variable is the difficulty of hashing. If more miners are hashing, they'll find blocks a bit more often than every ten minutes on average, and then the difficulty will be increased in the next two-week period in order to adjust for that. What changes is the difficulty, and what remains fixed is the timing. The heartbeat is always targeted to ten minutes on average across many blocks, and what changes is the difficulty so that the heartbeat retargets to ten minutes. Then the ten-minute time period is hard-coded into the software. That is the one static heartbeat of Bitcoin. When more people become miners as they can earn Bitcoin, is there any effect to the Bitcoin ecosystem? If the miners are more than the transactions needed to be verified, will this cause competition between the miners? In fact, that's already the case. Miners do not split transactions between them. Miners all mine pretty much the same transactions, because all of the transactions that are available in the system and need to be mined are shared with everyone. Everyone has a copy of what's called the mempool, where they have the unconfirmed transactions. Think of it as a giant reservoir where unconfirmed transactions are waiting, and every miner has their own copy of this reservoir, and they use it to construct their candidate box that they're going to run the proof-of-work algorithm on. They try to cram as many of those transactions as they can fit into their candidate block. The competition isn't between miners as to what transactions they're going to mine. The competition between miners is how much hashing power they can put into their proof-of-work, so they can find a solution first. However, there is also competition in the transaction reservoir, or mempool, if you like, which is there's competition between transaction senders. If you send a transaction and you want it mined faster, you put a higher fee, and you're competing against everybody else who's trying to get space in the limited space of the block for their transaction, and you're competing through the pricing mechanism of fees. So all the users are competing for space in the block, and all miners are competing for speed in terms of how fast they solve the lock, so they can be first, because the Bitcoin mining algorithm is a winner takes all. So the first miner to win is the only one who gets rewarded.