Blocks / minting timeline
New bitcoins are created as part of bitcoin blocks. The blocks are built on top of each other in a chain. This page shows the blocks generated at BitMinter. If someone else builds a block at the same height as us, one of the blocks (theirs or ours) will become orphaned and yield no coins. If the block is orphaned upon creation it will be listed as stale. This can happen if a proof of work for creating a block is submitted too late, after we have already started building at the next height.
If you have the prepay perk activated you get paid when a block is created, as long as it is not stale. If the block is later orphaned you still keep the coins. Without the perk you must wait until enough new blocks have been built on top of it that the block is considered confirmed. This confirmation status is shown below.
With merged mining we also make namecoins with no additional effort. Namecoins are shown as type NMC, and bitcoins as BTC.
All timestamps are in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).