# Hal

> Blocks are arriving faster than ten minutes. Miners added hash. The next Turning will push difficulty up.

## Hal's numbers

- Block height: 972,918
- Last block: Oct 24, 7:57 AM ET
- Average block, last day: 9 min 48 s
- Average block, this period: 9 min 31 s
- Hashrate, last day: 1,027 EH/s
- Difficulty: 140.6 T
- Period done: 59.8%
- Difficulty change at this pace: +5.0%
- Blocks to the halving: 77,082
- Mempool: 24.8 vMB
- Next-block fee: 0.50 sat/vB
- Supply issued: 20,102,871.88 BTC

Source: Bitcoin Hashpoint, node Hal. Block 972,918, mined Sat, Oct 24, 2026, 7:57 AM ET.

## Who Hal is
Hal is the Hashpoint's own Bitcoin node. He runs on a small computer in Dennis's home office, and he has downloaded and checked every block since January 3, 2009, by himself, with no one's word taken for any of it. He carries the name of Hal Finney, who ran the software on the first day, received the first bitcoin transaction from Satoshi and spent his time checking the work for himself. Our Hal does the same job, every ten minutes or so, for as long as the power stays on.

Hal does not trade, guess or forecast. He reads the chain and reports what it says. When this publication writes "the chain shows," Hal is the one who looked.

## What Hal does for the Hashpoint
- He counts. Block height, blocks left in each difficulty period, blocks left until the next halving.
- He keeps time. He measures how fast blocks arrive, over the last day and since the last difficulty adjustment.
- He audits the money. Every morning his supply audit adds up every coin issued and checks it against the schedule fixed in the rules: 20,999,999.9769 bitcoin, and not one satoshi more.
- He sets the chain feasts. The Turnings, the Millionth Block and the Halving Jubilees fall on block heights, not calendar dates. Hal turns those heights into dates.
- He feeds the morning data. His numbers go into the 6:05 AM data pull behind every daily edition.

## How Hal sets a feast date
A chain feast happens at a block height. Bitcoin aims for one block every ten minutes, but it never hits ten minutes exactly. So Hal takes the blocks still to come, multiplies by his measured pace, and adds the result to the time of the latest block. That gives an estimated moment. He also gives a margin, the plus or minus that comes from the pace wobbling, and the margin shrinks as the feast gets closer.

When the margin falls under twelve hours and the whole window sits inside one Eastern calendar day, Hal locks the date for the feast. He also locks it no later than three days out. After that the date never moves. If the block itself arrives on a different day, the feast stays where it was locked, like an observed holiday, and the record notes the block's actual time.

Right now: block 972,918, average block time 9 min 48 s over the last day, next Turning estimated Thu, Oct 29, 2026 (± 15 hours). As of Sat, Oct 24, 2026, 7:57 AM ET.

## What moves the days
- Hashrate. When miners add machines, blocks come faster than ten minutes, and every chain feast slides earlier. When miners switch off, in a heat wave, a storm or a price drop, blocks slow and the feasts slide later.
- The Turning. Every 2,016 blocks, the network resets its difficulty so that blocks return to a ten-minute average. A big hashrate jump before a Turning pulls dates in; the Turning then pushes the pace back toward ten minutes.
- Luck. Blocks arrive at random, like rain on a roof. Two can land a minute apart, and an hour can pass with none. Over a day the luck averages out; over an hour it does not. That randomness is most of the margin.
- The halvings. Every 210,000 blocks the reward to miners halves. If some miners switch off afterward, blocks slow until the next Turning catches up.
- Clocks. Each block carries a timestamp that miners set, and the rules allow some slack. Hal measures the pace across many blocks, so a single odd timestamp does not move a feast.

## What does not move the days
- The mempool. The mempool is the waiting room of unconfirmed transactions. A full one raises fees, but it does not make blocks come any faster or slower. Hal reports it because fees matter to anyone sending bitcoin, not because it changes the calendar.
- The price. A big price move can change how many miners run their machines, which reaches the calendar through hashrate. The price itself has no say over the block clock.

## Ask Hal
Hal's numbers are open to people and to machines. The live figures on this page come from /api/v1/hal, and a plain-text version of this page lives at /hal.md. Cite them as: Source: Bitcoin Hashpoint, node Hal.

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JSON: https://bitcoinhashpoint.com/api/v1/hal
Source: https://bitcoinhashpoint.com/hal/