10th March 2013 weekly pool and network statistics

Welcome, miners.

Changelog:

• BTGGuild pool op eleuthria provided me with a fancypants new API last week, which means that not only is the calculated hashrate now accurate (now confidence interval required) but I can also calculate the pool luck, CDF, shares per round / Difficulty, and chart the intraweek hashrates. All have been included this week.
• Since HHTT has become a top ten pool (in terms of percentage of network hashrate) I spent some time including them this week. The hashrate has a confidence interval since the current data is insufficient to calculate the pool's luck, and I'm not certain that my script for it wont break as the HTML for the site doesn't seem to be standard. Be prepared for HHTT to be missing every now and then.

The "Predictions that came true" department
From last week's post:

The hashrate at Ozcoin has increased consistently since well before ASICs were being used on the pool, and their percentage of the network averaged at 50% more than DeepBit for the past week. If hashrates continue to change as they have for the last four weeks, Ozcoin could be the second largest pool in the network within a month.

This has happened somewhat sooner than I expected - Ozcoin miners now pool the second largest amount of network hashing, after BTCGuild. A large number of ASICs joined them over this past week. The top three pools now gather more than 50% of the networks total hashes.

The sources of "unknown" hashes has declined even further, down to 10% of network blocks solved this week. Once difficulty is increased to the point that GPU mining is prohibitive, the "unknowns" will represent only solominers and dark pools without botnets - so I expect this percentage to drop even further over the coming weeks.

Deepbit is being hopped a little, and Slush's pool is being hopped is a way that hasn't occurred for a long time. Although I haven't checked, I wouldn't expect this to have a very significant effect on miner earnings.

MTRED is actually using variable difficulty, but I haven't found any details about it on the MTRED website yet so I'm not sure they're "ASIC ready".

Top 10 pools which are "ASIC ready" (in order of size):

• BTCGuild
• Ozcoin
• Slush's pool
• Bitminter
• EclipseMC
• HHTT
• Itzod

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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