30th December weekly pool and network statistics

 Welcome, miners.

This week I was unable to obtain data for two pools: Maxbtc and Bitminter. In the case of Maxbtc it seems relatively simple: The Maxbtc pool op kindly provided me with an API key which appears to have ceased working. Hopefully this will be resolved next week.

In the case of Bitminter, it's a bit more serious. I can't access the website at all. Like BTCGuild last week and DeepBit before that, Bitminter has been the victim of DDoS attacks during the past week, so at a guess I'd say that's the reason for the website being inaccessible.

These pointless DDoS attacks have become the method for angsty teens to get attention or kudos with their friends or something. Certainly they're not earning anything out of it. Bitminter's admin has not even had a message from the attacker. All they seem to be doing is disrupting pooled mining infrastructure like the teenaged vandals they are.

In other news, all the top pools lost some share of the network hashrate this week except for Ozcoin, perhaps because of their innovative "POT" reward method. It does beg the question: from where are the extra hashes coming?

There is still no significant pool hopping happening this week (see figure 7) so there's no point posting figure 8 this week.

Have a fun new year! All the best, and lets wish that college starts early this year so we can get back to mining without the hovering threat of DDoS attacks.

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). Not included this week.

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

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