16th December weekly pool and network statistics

Welcome, miners.

Well, this has been a week of firsts. Slush's overtaking Deepbit's percentage of the network last week was no aberration, so for the first time in over a year slush's pool has a significantly high percentage of the network than Deepbit. Deepbit's hashrate slide continues unabated.

This is also the first time since I started recording the data that neither Slush nor Deepbit have been at the mercy of pool hoppers, as far as I can tell. Where have all the hoppers gone?

It's also the first full week since the bitcoin mining block reward halved, and probably because of this the first time since June that the network hashrate has dropped so precipitously for two weeks in a row. Interestingly, many pools saw a significant increase in their proportion of the network hashrate. This either indicates that they aren't losing their miners, or that the network was just very unlucky and the hashrate estimate is closer to the upper bound. Next week should make it clearer.

Figure 1: Table of all pools with public data and their various statistics averaged for the last seven days - for smaller pools the average may be more or less than seven days, depending on number of blocks solved for the week. Network hashrate and 50BTC.com hashrate are estimates, the upper and lower 95% confidence interval bounds are included.

Figure 2: Chart of network hashrate, hashrate of the largest mining pool, combined hashrates of the three largest mining pools, and a line representing 50% of the network hashrate. Handy if you're worried about 51% attacks. The upper and lower 95% confidence interval bounds for the network hashrate are in between the shaded areas.

Figure 3: Chart of chronology of pool hashrates, averaged per week.

Figure 4: Chart of average hashrates per pool per round for the week, and per 144 rounds for the network. The upper and lower 95% confidence interval bounds for the network hashrate are in between the shaded areas.

Figure 5: Chart of chronology of negative binomial CDF probability of shares submitted and blocks produced for the week.

Figure 6: Chart of chronology of round length divided by difficulty, averaged per week.

Figure 7: Chart of hashrate vs round length for hoppable pools (the larger the hashrate increase at the start of a round, the larger the loss to strategic miners).

Figure 8: Chart of fulltime miner earnings loss at a proportional pool caused by pool hoppers, expressed as expected PPS earnings for fulltime miners. Currently only for Bitlc and Deepbit. Only valid if strategic pool hopping is actually occurring (see figure 7).

Thanks to blockexplorer.com and blockchain.info for use of their network statistics.

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