About block 959,616
Bitcoin block 959,616 was mined by F2Pool on July 25, 2026 at 10:51 PM UTC, 11 min 52 s after block 959,615. That is slower than the 10-minute target; long gaps are normal, since every hash attempt is an independent draw with the same tiny chance.
It confirmed 4,892 transactions in 1.51 MB (99.9% of the 4 million weight-unit limit). The median transaction paid 1.00 sat/vB, and all fees added up to 0.0160 BTC. With the 3.125 BTC subsidy of halving era 5, F2Pool earned 3.1410 BTC for this block.
Block 959,616 is number 1 of 2,016 in difficulty epoch 476; 2,015 blocks remain until the next difficulty adjustment at block 961,631. The next halving is at block 1,050,000, 90,384 blocks after this one.
Its hash starts with 20 zeros: that is the proof of work, a number below the target that the whole network’s hashrate had to search for. F2Pool found 172 blocks in the week before. Today the block has 13,910 confirmations, so it is settled beyond any practical doubt.
Why block 959,616 is notable
Block 959,616 opens difficulty epoch 476. Every 2,016 blocks, each node recalculates the mining difficulty from how long the previous epoch took: if those blocks arrived in less than two weeks, difficulty goes up; if they took longer, it goes down, never by more than a factor of four. The new value, 126,231,507,121,868, took effect with this block, found by F2Pool on July 25, 2026 at 10:51 PM UTC, and applies until block 961,631; the following adjustment is at block 961,632.
Nobody schedules a retarget. It happens when the chain reaches the height, so the adjustment at block 959,616 came the moment F2Pool found it, not on a fixed date. The rule keeps the average close to one block every ten minutes however much hashrate joins or leaves the network.
Of the 3.1409612 BTC that F2Pool collected for this block, 3.125 BTC was new subsidy and 0.0159612 BTC came from fees, 0.5% of the total; leaving out the coinbase, its 4,891 transactions paid about 326 sats each on average.
Current difficulty epoch and next adjustment →
What’s inside a Bitcoin block
Every block, 959,616 included, is made of the same parts:
- Header
- Eighty bytes that miners hash over and over: the version, the hash of the previous block, the Merkle root that summarises every transaction, a timestamp, the difficulty target in compact form and a nonce. A block is valid when the hash of its header falls below the target.
- Coinbase transaction
- The first transaction, written by the miner. It spends no inputs: it creates the subsidy and collects the fees, and since BIP 34 it must also record the block height.
- Transactions
- Everything else in the block: payments taken from the mempool, usually picked by fee rate because space is capped at 4 million weight units. Block 959,616 holds 4,892, counting the coinbase.
- Fees
- The difference between what each transaction spends and what it creates. The miner claims them in the coinbase; they are the part of the reward set by demand rather than by the protocol.
- Subsidy
- New bitcoin created by the block, fixed by the halving schedule: 50 BTC at the start, halved every 210,000 blocks. At height 959,616 it is 3.125 BTC.