February 9th 2014 Weekly Hashrate Contributor and Network Statistics

Other weekly pool and network statistics posts


Welcome, miners.

Changelog:

• Changed the hashrate scaling for figure 6 to Thps.
• Improved the generation address ownership algorithm, resulting in slightly fewer "Unknown" blocks.

Usual pools missing from results:

• I haven't rebuilt this part yet - still TBA.

Errors:

• I still haven't found any.

0. No orphaned block charts yet
I think I've found the best way to chart orphaned blocks, I just need time to do it. Hopefully I'll find time this week or the next.

1. The network hashrate continues to increase, as do unknown contributors
Another 1226 blocks solved this week, 218 more than expected. Of these, 104 blocks are from unknown contributors. If you turn to table 3, you can see that one of the generation addresses has now been assigned a total of 24 blocks, five in this week alone. Interestingly, none of the block reward has moved from this address yet. It seems there are some new cloud-hashers around. Maybe KNC has gotten their data centre going already?

That's all I have time for this week. Enjoy the chartporn, and see if you can find out to whom some of the richer unknown generation addresses belong.


Explanation of the tables and charts.

Table 1: Solved block statistics. This table lists all statistics that can be derived from the number of blocks a hashrate contributor has solved for the past week. Block attributions are from either coinbase signatures, known generation addresses or claimed by a particular pool block history. Includes non-Pool hashrate contributors. Note that actual pool hashrates when derived from shares submitted per unit time will be more accurate than the hashrate estimates given in this table.

"Unknown" is not an entity, but simply the group of blocks to which I cannot give attribution using the methods given above.

Table 2: Pool reported block history statistics.  This table lists all statistics that can be derived from the number of blocks a hashrate contributor has solved for the past week using all solved blocks - both valid and orphaned - and difficulty 1 shares per round. 

• A much more accurate estimate of the hashrate, confidence intervals are unnecessary.
• Orphan races lost, and percentage of  solved blocks that were not added to the blockchain.
• "Luck" is the usual difficulty 1 equivalent shares per round / mining difficulty,  or (equivalently) accepted shares / expected shares.
• CDF: The cumulative density function (CDF) measures the percentage of the time this number accepted shares / expected shares would be less than the calculated value, given the number of valid + invalid blocks.
• Bitcoin per Gigashare. This figure is not an indicator of how much a miner should have expected per one billion Difficulty 1 shares (or one thousand difficulty megashares, etc), since it doesn't take into account the reward method or fees charged. Rather, it should be considered as a "luck" index that also incorporates the number of orphaned blocks and the current reward per block.

Since BTC Guild doesn't report shares per block but does report transaction hashes for all blocks, luck calculations cannot be calculated but orphaned blocks can. Pools such as "Discus Fish" that don't have a public pool interface cannot be included.

 Table 3: Reused but unknown generation addresses

Unknown generation addresses that are not reused are probably solominers or private mining concerns that don't have share-holders wanting to follow transactions. However, reused addresses are probably from hash contributors that do not wish to remain anonymous. These need to be identified so they can be removed from the "Unknown" group. I'm not interested in identifying those who wish to remain completely anonymous, so I'm not trying to trace originating IP addresses (as Blockchain.info does).

Table 1: Blocks solved by unknown but re-used generation addresses Feb 02 2014 to Feb 08 2014

Unknown recurring generation address	Blocks solved this week	Percentage of network	Percentage of unknown	Estimate of hashrate	Blocks solved ever
1BrNxJY7kgPmAewpRwpC3bYuZseCzk5VoJ	8	0.65 %	8.42 %	134 Thps	8
12GFpNrkc6HS4L9WeMMkzpVqz6wnCuBru9	5	0.41 %	5.26 %	90 Thps	5
1GuMujABuc8kvzDTyVJFpcf4vszPUgsjiU	5	0.41 %	5.26 %	93 Thps	24
13zfogwHjGHbF3vt7XpZJGdMqtyNqYr6AM	3	0.24 %	3.16 %	47 Thps	5
14N7rVf4TPKvraR2pBr9z1Hwsi46TAzXBm	3	0.24 %	3.16 %	47 Thps	8
1G9QNTLvP3PbhDf6r9AhtwYQBxbt8rnnu8	3	0.24 %	3.16 %	47 Thps	10
1K7znxRfkS8R1hcmyMvHDum1hAQreS4VQ4	3	0.24 %	3.16 %	56 Thps	3
1DgtHUPcMQMW3y1L51K1TjXw2SAbH4jynP	2	0.16 %	2.11 %	37 Thps	3

Figure 1: Pie chart of the percentage of network blocks by pool. A visual representation of the "Percentage of network" data aggregated in table 1.

Figure 2:  51% attack chart. Historical hashrates of the bitcoin network, the largest mining pool, the three largest mining pools combined, and a line representing 50% of the network hashrate. Handy if you're worried about 51% attacks. Hashrates are all estimated from blocks solved, and the history goes back to the earliest date the data contains three known pools. Some pool data may be missing from the earliest data points. The upper and lower 95% confidence interval bounds for the network hashrate are in between the shaded areas. 

Figure 3: Percentage of blocks solved each week for the current top ten contributors.
Data is calculated from the number of blocks each contributor added to the blockchain during the week. The points are the actual data; the lines are exponentiated smoothing splines of the log of the data.

Figure 4: Average hashrate per solved block (valid + invalid)
Hashrates are calculated from the pool reported difficulty 1 equivalent shares per round and the pool reported block solve times for all solved blocks, both valid and invalid. Note that BTC Guild is not included since the difficulty 1 equivalent shares per round data is not reported; instead use BTC Guild's hashrate chart which has matched my past estimates quite well and which I regard as accurate.

Figure 5: Pool "luck" (valid + invalid solved blocks)
The orange dots are the usual accepted shares / expected shares (equivalently, shares per round / network Difficulty). The background colours are accepted shares / expected shares confidence intervals for the number of blocks solved for the week. The greater the number of blocks solved (the higher the percentage of the network) the narrower the bounds.
The "luck" data points should be outside the upper or lower boundaries only rarely. Many data points outside this range indicate unusual and unlikely "luck".

Data only goes back for the last twelve months at most - any more data points than this becomes hard to read, and recent data is most important.

Note that all solved blocks are used, otherwise the data would no longer be Erlang distributed and a CDF could not be calculated.

Figure 6: Pool user hashrate and combined user hashrate densities.
The top facet of this chart shows the proportion of user accounts with a given hashrate - the thicker the "violin" the greater the density of user accounts with a particular hashrate.

The bottom facet is the same data, weighted by hashrate. In effect, it shows what proportion of the pool's hashrate is supplied by particular hashrates. The area of the "violins" is proportional to their total hashrate.

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

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Find a typo or spelling error? Email me with the details at organofcorti@organofcorti.org and if you're the first to email me I'll pay you per ten errors:

Please refer to the most recent blog post for current rates or rule changes.

I'm terrible at proofreading, so some of these posts may be worth quite a bit to the keen reader.
Exceptions:

• Errors in text repeated across multiple posts: I will only pay for the most recent errors rather every single occurrence.
• Errors in chart texts: Since I can't fix the chart texts (since I don't keep the data that generated them) I can't pay for them. Still, they would be nice to know about!

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