Blocks As They Land Screensaver
The Blocks As They Land screensaver shows the most recent Bitcoin blocks with their height, transaction count, weight and — most tellingly — the actual gap in minutes since the previous block. It runs in the browser with nothing to install; press ESC to exit.
How the Blocks As They Land screensaver works
The saver reads Blockstream's public Esplora API, key-free.
No account and no key: the request goes straight from your browser, or from this site's own refreshed copy of the feed where the source does not permit browser access.
Values are drawn on a canvas that resizes with the window, so it works on a laptop or a wall display.
If the source is unreachable the saver says so on screen rather than showing stale numbers as though they were current.
A worked example
Each row is a block: its height, how many transactions it carried, its weight in megaweight units, and the gap since the block before it. That gap is the interesting column. Mining is a Poisson process, so although the average is ten minutes, gaps of two minutes and gaps of fifty are both normal and both happen most days. Gaps of twenty minutes or more are drawn in orange.
Settings & tips
- Accent and Background recolour the display without changing the data.
- Add it to a Multi-view grid to watch it alongside other live savers.
- Press ESC at any time to leave fullscreen.
Frequently asked questions
- Why are the gaps between blocks so uneven?
- Because mining is a memoryless random process. Each attempt has a fixed tiny probability of succeeding, so the waiting time is exponentially distributed. Ten minutes is the mean, not a schedule, and long gaps are expected rather than a sign of trouble.
- What is weight?
- A measure that replaced raw byte size when SegWit was introduced. The block limit is four million weight units, and witness data counts less than other data, so weight describes capacity more accurately than a byte count.
- Is this real data?
- Yes. It comes from Blockstream's public Esplora API, key-free. Nothing is invented or simulated, and if the source cannot be reached the saver reports that instead of drawing something plausible.
- Does it cost anything or need an account?
- No. Every screensaver here is free, runs in the browser and needs no sign-up. This one uses a public API that requires no key.