5th May 2013 weekly pool and network statistics

Welcome, miners.

Changelog:

• Nil.

Pools missing from results:

• Eligius - pool stats were in process of being modes to a new server. 

Errors:

• Coinotron did not solve a block during the week, although due to an error with the script I wrote, they are listed as solving two. This has been fixed and won't happen again.

"ASIC ready" pools:

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

Pool hopping:

• Probably none. DeepBit's results on chart 7 are a bit suggestive, but nothing significant.

Ozcoin closed for a few days this week so that pool op Graet could be absolutely certain that the pool was working as it should. If any readers out there want to run a pool, then this is the example you should be following. If my Avalon had been delivered I'd be including Ozcoin in my group of pools.

Another hack attempt - BTCGuild pool op eleuthria reported to his miners that persons had attempted and failed to gain access to a BTCGuild server using social engineering techniques. He warned his miners about this as soon as it happened. He also put the pool's PPS fee up to 7.5% to attempt to mitigate the large share of the network the pool has - however this hasn't stopped BTCGuild's growth completely, with 41.0% of the network's blocks solved by BTCGuild this week.

Finally, there's a concern that BitMinter was having unusually poor luck for the past few weeks. I've performed an audit for pool op DrHaribo, and have found nothing unusual at all - so if you were worried about mining at BitMinter, you need worry no more. I'll post the results as soon as I'm able.

 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 pool user hashrate distribution. Note that for some pools this average is over twenty four hours, some pools are averaged over an an hour or more and some for only fifteen minutes, so expect some variance in the results.

Thanks to blockexplorer.com and blockchain.info for use of their network statistics.

organofcorti.blogspot.com is a reader supported blog:

12QxPHEuxDrs7mCyGSx1iVSozTwtquDB3r