How Bitcoin Works [video] 3b1b
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I didn't realize that the mining process had a lottery-like nature to it. I always assumed that if you bother to mine then you are guaranteed to churn out coins. But I still don't quite get how this process scales to hundreds of thousands of people mining all over the world, as it seems like you could quickly end up with many many competing chains.
you end up on a diff chain if the bitcoin software you run has different consensus rules. Nobody would do this because there is no incentive to be on a brand new network by yourself even if you managed to have enough hash power to survive the difficulty algorithm.
even if you do mine a lot of bitcoinXfork, good luck trading/selling it.
LET ME GOOGLE THAT FOR ME: Ok, this chart shows that the average time is around 8 minutes. I guess that makes sense as being enough time for the info to quickly spread amongst all nodes that a block was mined.