9th December weekly pool and network statistics

Welcome, miners.

The script rewrites have worked well, except for BTCGuild. Despite the pool op (bitcointalk forum member eleuthria) spending a great deal of personal time helping me both recently and previously, providing custom urls and JSON feeds, I'm simply not confident of my ability to make the script I wrote work consistently.

To avoid future problems, I've changed the assessment of the pool hashrate to be similar to that of 50BTC.com, providing a hashrate estimate with a 95% confidence interval lower and upper bound  instead. I apologise for this, but having stable an reliable script has to take priority if I'm to get pool statistics posted on time, and this solution is a much simpler and more reliable one. Thank you for all your help in the past, eleuthria.

Many pools took a hashrate hit this week as GPU miners ceased mining. Among those who maintained their pool hashrate and so increased their proportion of the network hashrate are: Slush's pool, BitMinter,  EclipseMC,  Itzod, MTRed and p2Pool. Do these pools have a preponderance of FPGA miners? Or maybe miners that pay low electricity costs?

On a final note, I don't see any pool hopping at DeepBit on charts 4 or 7. But the pool hashrate is the lowest it has been for many months, and as a proportion of the network hashrate they are now in fourth place. Succeeding losing pool hoppers at the same time as the block reward halved is probably the main reason for this large drop in pool earnings.

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.

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

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