[twokei]

A fork could be created just by taking the existing longest chain, and attempting to append a block to the frontiers blocks parent, or even to the frontier block itself. It's pretty simple. The time between blocks still is non-deterministic, and not often is there realistically a clear winner.

There existing n forks, even at a bare minimum of 3 forks of the same height is very common, especially if you consider how many miners there are in the entirety of the Bitcoin network.

[gus_massa]

I tried to find the details about the current mini-forks but I couldn't. Do you have a link? I guess the number is small because the mining pools are well connected and none of them want to waste resources (because they loose money).

Probably 3 forks is a good number, but I'd like to see some data. Anyway, it's a linear problem that is adjusted automatically by the difficulty to find the next block. It's not an exponential problem that makes the protocol unpractical at scale.

[twokei]

The difficulty adjustment algorithm for Bitcoin is unfortunately very naive - there is a reason blockchain timestamps have a 2 hour deviation.

For some data, look into orphan blocks: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/orphaned-blocks