December 14th 2014 Network Statistics

Other weekly network statistics posts

Changelog:

• Big changes! See below.

Errorlog:

• Nil.

Notifications:

• This is a work in progress, and will be continuously optimised (fiddled with). Feel free to comment - you might just see your suggestion appear.

0. The new network statistics start here
I thought it might be an idea to start posting the charts I have updated as I complete them.

I will be including network hashrate forecasts, transaction fee analysis, miner hashrate distribution (as well as block maker hashrate distribution), centralisation, and some other stuff that's slipped my mind. I've also fixed the hashrate confidence interval estimate (note to self: when recycling code, make sure it does what you think it does).

Feedback and suggestions will be appreciated. At the end you can see the sections I have planned - should they all go in this post or should they be split into a 'network statistics' and 'block maker statistics' post?

Solved block statistics table. 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 either from primary sources such as those claimed by a particular pool website, or secondary sources such as coinbase signatures, or known generation addresses. When dependent on secondary sources only, data may be inaccurate and miss some blocks if a particular block-solver has gone to some trouble to hide solved blocks. This will result in an underestimate of the block-solver hashrate.

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 the group of blocks to which I cannot give attribution using the methods given above. "BitAffNet" is Bitcoin Affiliate Network.

Although I update regularly, I don't correct old posts.

The network hashrate

The plots below show the network hashrate since block height 1, for the last year and for the last six months. The mean estimate is calculated using the daily average hashrate.

The second and thirst charts also include confidence intervals for the hashrate, the mean hashrate estimate, and a 28 day forecast estimate.

• The dashed line is the mean hashrate estimate.
• The grey shaded area is the 95% confidence interval for the mean hashrate estimate.
• The dotted line is the 95% confidence interval for daily hashrate averages, given the mean hashrate estimate, so 95% of the large grey dots (average daily hashrate) should be within the dotted line.
• The blue shaded areas are the confidence intervals for the forecast.
• Forecast confidence intervals are bootstrapped.

You notice that the mean forecast is not given - just the confidence intervals. The reason for this is that in the past people have focussed on the mean forecast, but I think the range of values the network hashrate could take is much more important.

Miner profitability and forecast

• The first plot below shows the weekly miner income and cumulative miner income for the past 52 weeks. 
• The second plot shows the weekly miner income for the past 26 weeks with an eight week forecast.
• The third plots shows the cumulative miner income eight week forecast.
• Forecast confidence intervals are bootstrapped.

Again, the mean forecast is not given for the same reasons I gave previously. Eight weeks forecast is possible as these are weekly summary statistics; for daily summary statistics (such as above) only four weeks forecast is possible with any accuracy.

Transaction fees
Transaction fees are often overlooked by miners but will become very important for them - as the block reward decreases, transaction fees must necessarily go some way toward ameliorating the loss in block reward.

However, as can be seen in the top facet of the second plot below the transaction fees per block are not increasing - or even maintaining - a percentage of the block reward.

The lower facet plots the percentage of block reward that transaction fees would have if block size was always maximum and the rate of fee per kb unchanged - the best possible transaction fees per block at current fee per block per kb rates.

In progress:

##### The network:
### Number of miners, average miner hashrate, median miner hashrate

##### Block makers:

### Hashrate distribution: Pie chart and histogram

### Hashrate distribution: top 10 block maker proportion of network

### Historical hashrate distribution heatmap: all block makers

### Centralisation visualisation

### Recurring generation addresses table

###  total tx fee as a percentage of block reward

###  tx fee as a percentage of block reward by pool

### total tx fee per kb size,  by pool

Organofcorti lives!

organofcorti.blogspot.com is a reader supported blog:

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Created using R and various packages, especially dplyr, data.table, ggplot2 and forecast.

Recommended reading:

• For help on ggplot2.
• For help on forecasting.

Thank you to blockchain.info and coinometrics.com for use of their transaction and address data, and coincadence.com for their p2pool miner data.

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 0.01 btc 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!

I write in British English.

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