January 25th 2015 Network Statistics

Other weekly network statistics posts

Weekly pool statistics posts

Weekly block maker statistics posts

Changelog:

• "Number of miners" plot optimised using a slightly better model than previously. The known number of miners is now also shown as a comparison.

Errorlog:

• Nil.

Notifications:

• Nil.

0. Network plateau continues.

949 blocks solved this week, with a 95% confidence interval upper bound of 1011 blocks. If the upper bound was less than 1008, the network would have contracting with 95% confidence.

I think the network will plateau or contract slightly for the next few weeks unless the price increases substantially.

1.  More on bitcoin transactions.
I encourage anyone who wants to learn more about bitcoin transactions to read Tim Swanson's interesting post "Slicing data: what comprises blockchain transactions?". There's lots of new information there, so it's a good read that will keep you up to date on recent changes in the way bitcoin transactions are being used.

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 third 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 the maximum possible block size that was used.

Estimated mean and median miner hashrate

This estimate is actually the average and median percentage of the network contributed by each miner.

Standard error has been calculated using bootstrapping resampled data, and is shown by the shaded area.

Estimated number of miners

The known number of miners is calculated using the miner hashrate distribution that some pools provide. It is shown by the dashed line, colour indicating the percentage of the network that those miners make.

The estimated number of miners uses a model to estimate the number of miners at pools that do not provide such data. I will be attempting to optimise the model regularly, so this week's plot may not be the same as last week's.

Standard error for the estimate has been calculated using bootstrapping resampled model data, and is shown by the shaded area.

 

##### to be done: Include AntPool in number of miner and mean / median miner estimates for data ##### 11th Nov 2014 onward

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.