17th February 2013 weekly pool and network statistics

Welcome, miners.

Two interesting happenings this week:

• Bitlc.net has closed its doors in somewhat strange circumstances. They may reopen and some possible investors have apparently shown interest in purchasing the pool, but the story itself seems somewhat baroque to me.
• In what is probably much bigger news to most miners, ASICMiner has started hashing with some of its ASICs, apparently running according to their schedule. Not the first to start ASIC hashing, but certainly the first t use sufficient ASIC hashes increase the network hashrate by 10%. ASICMiner are on BTCGuild, and BTCGuild's hashrate has increased from 4Thps on 11th Feb to 7Thps today. ASICMIner have currently found 46 blocks for BTCGuild, so on average they'll have earned around 1150 btc, or about US$ 31 000 ( ignoring pool fees and assuming an exchange rate of US$ 27 / BTC ) .

There are as yet no confirmed reports of Avalon ASIC hashers apart from the two known ones.

In other news, Ozcoin is back in the top five and look set to overtake Deepbit if current trends continue, both slush's pool and DeepBit continue to be pool hopped,  and Coinotron's webpage was down today.

As usual, please post comments if there's anything you don't understand, with which you disagree, or just think is wrong.


The charts

Table: 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 1: Pie chart of the percentage of network blocks hashrate by pool. "Unknown" combines those pools for which I can't scrape statistics, solominers and private pools. The percentage of network hashrate will only be approximate since the exact network hashrate is unknown.

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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