7th April 2013 weekly pool and network statistics

Welcome, miners.

Changelog:

• Figure 3 (top 10 hashrate history) is back to using a base 10 logarithmic y axis since some pools which once had a very high proportion of the network have a much lower proportion and visa versa. The only way to show a comparison is by using a log y axis.

Pools missing from results:

• None

"ASIC ready" pools:

• BTCGuild
• 50BTC.com
• Slush's pool
• Ozcoin
• HHTT
• Bitminter
• EclipseMC
• Eligius
• Bitparking
• Itzod
• Triplemining

Pool hopping:

• Slush's pool - was being hopped for about 5 days during the week. Still not much though, and I doubt it's having a significant impact on fulltime miner earnings.

The weekly average network hashrate increased by ~ 6 Thps this week. BTCGuild's hashrate only increased by another 2Thps, with 38% of the network blocks for this week. Pool op eleuthria has decided on a number of proposals to limit BTCGuild's influence over the network, including increasing the pool fee if the pool's proportion of the network exceeds 40%. This is a move I applaud, and is a good indicator of eleuthria's commitment to bitcoin and not just profits.

"Unknown" is down to 5% of the network. There are a few pools of which I know that I can't yet include in the weekly stats, and between them they account for about 2% of the network - so there's still 3% completely unknown. So still no indication that any significant number of ASICs are going solo.

HHTT lost 90% of their hashrate in the past few days, in the wake of concerns about pool bankruptcy - an ever present possibility for a PPS only pool. Pool op fireduck is busy changing the payout method to PPLNS and has assured all miners that all owed earnings will be paid. Since fireduck also works for SatoshiDice, I'd have to guess he can make good on that commitment.

ecki, previously small pool ( run by a German fellow permanently work-vacationing on Koh Samui , and of whom I'm rather jealous ) just increased their hashrate by 1000% with the addition of someone with about 7 Avalon's worth of hashrate. Unfortunately I can't yet include them in the network stats since their page is a bit hard to scrape, but I hope to include them soon.

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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