6th January 2013 weekly pool and network statistics

Welcome, miners.

Maxbtc returns this week - Maxbtc's pool op fixed the problem very quickly. Thanks! Bitminter is of course back on, showing a significant drop in their share of the network due to the DDoS attacks that occurred over the past two weeks. Hopefully the pool will recover quickly.

Ozcoin continues to increase their share of the network, quite close to EclipseMC now. It will be interesting to see how much of the increase was due to Bitminter miners backing up to Ozcoin ( note on Figure 4 the slight drop in Ozcoin pool hashrate at about the time Bitminter's DDoS finished) and how much is due to their innovative payout method "POT".

Pool hopping seems to have started with the new year at BitcoinPool, Slush's pool and Deepbit.

Finally, there seems to be a problem with the script for BTCMine which I hope to fix before next week.




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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