16.10 Spiral plots of block solve rates

0. Introduction
Finding good ways to express pool hashrates and network percentages is something I've worked at for a while. I've made some good visualisations and some that are not so good. Today I was reading some data visualisation blogs and found this interesting post about Stefanie Posavec and her "sentence drawings" (video interview here).

The idea is that each line is the length of a sentence. At the end of each sentence the line takes a ninety degree turn and continues. Below is the sentence drawing of first chapter of George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four":

Apart from being beautiful, I realised immediately that this would also be an interesting way to visualise pool hashrates. Instead of each line being the length of a sentence, it could be the length of time between solved blocks. The results were more than I expected and quite different to the sentence drawings, seeming to have more in common with a random walk in two dimensions.

I've called them 'spiral plots' because I think 'sentence drawings' is confusing in this context. Due to some plotting issues, there's a little variability in x:y ratios, so the time guide at the bottom is only accurate for horizontal lines. Fixed.

1. Slow starts: GHash.IO and Discus Fish (f2pool.com)
GHash.IO has a few very slow blocks at first (long blue sections) and then sped up the rate of block solving significantly. Both Bitfury and Discus Fish had slow starts but when their hashrate increased it changed suddenly (light blue onwards).

2. Slow finishes: DeepBit and BitLC
These pools have seen better days. BitLC closed in 2012 and DeepBit's last block was November last year. Both pools started well, both failed slowly. The only thing in common? Both used proportional reward methods.

3. Survivors: BitMinter, BTC Guild and Slush's pool
These pools are the old guard. They've been around a long time and have seen many pools come and go, and no doubt will outlast many current mining pools. They have all experienced some loss of hashrate recently - the redder lines tend to be longer.

4. Happy memories: BTC Mine, HHTT, MT Red
Some of these pools were very popular in their day, others less so. Sadly, none survived long into the age of the ASIC, even though HHTT was one of the first to offer variable difficulty and a variable fee that rewarded those submitting only high difficulty shares.

5. Something broke: 50BTC.com, Mineb.tc and YourBTC
50BTC.com is still around, but after being unable to make good on some of their miner payments, they lost a lot of miners. Mineb.tc and YourBTC both had orderly but sudden closures.

6. n00b and 1337: Bitcoin Affiliate Network and Satoshi
I don't really need to comment here, except that the second of the pair is yet another representation of Satoshi's hashrate which shows periods of intense hashing interspersed with hashless periods.

7. Conclusions
What I like about this type of visualisation is that you can take in the entire history of a pool at a single glance, which more than makes up for what the method lacks in detail. If I get some time and if readers find this interesting I'll fiddle with colours and also fix the axis skew bug fixed.







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