3rd February 2013 weekly pool and network statistics

Welcome, miners.

A few things happened this week that are worthy of note. First, the large spike in the 144 block average network hashrate. Although there is some uncertainty due to the estimated nature of the network hashrate, this peak started around January 31st,  peaked February 2nd, and was back to around 22000 Ghps by today. Anyone hazard as guess as to the reason for it? Or was it just a peak in luck?

Slush's pool saw a major influx of hashes - since the start of the week about 600 Ghps has been added. Most other pools have lost a proportion of the network hashrate, and the "unknown" portion of the pie has increased since last week - solominers, dark pools, or just a lucky week for the network? It's hard to tell, but at the moment I'm working on a method of determining an estimate for the network hashrate which seems to be a bit easier to interpret and possibly more accurate than current methods, although more computationally expensive.

Since the first Avalon units arrived this week, I'd say many more surprises are in store for us next week. Stay tuned.


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


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.

Donations help give me the time to analyse bitcoin mining related issues and post the results.

If you enjoy my posts or if I've saved you some coins or helped you earn more, please consider a small bitcoin donation:

12QxPHEuxDrs7mCyGSx1iVSozTwtquDB3r