Neighbourhood Pool Watch: October 4th 2015 Block Maker Statistics

Changelog:

Nil.

Errorlog:

Nil.

To do list:

Find out who the new block maker is, and the best block attribution method.

0. BTC China pool
Last week I mentioned the consistency of the hashrate increase at at BTC China pool. This week a combination of a drop in BitFury's hashrate and the continued BTC China pool increase means that they now contribute a larger chunk of the network than BitFury. If the increase continues at the current rate they could be the largest miner on the network by the end of the year.

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.

"BitAffNet" is Bitcoin Affiliate Network

"Dot pool" and "Day pool" are block makers that are unknown, but that have enduring coinbase signatures, address clustering, or generation address reuse similarities. However, since they are unknown and unclaimed we can't be sure if these block makers are actually part of another known block maker.

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

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).

(None shown this week, still trying to find a nice way to display multiple generation addresses associated with each block)

Blocks solved by unknown but re-used generation addresses Sep 27 2015 to Oct 03 2015
Unknown recurring generation address	Blocks solved this week	Percentage of network	Percentage of unknown	Estimate of hashrate	Blocks solved ever
NA	NA	NA%	NA %	NA Thps	NA

Diachronic hashrate distribution: Stacked histogram percentage of network blocks over the past week.

Rather than a simple "pie chart" of blocks solved over the past week, this plot represents an estimate of the hashrate intensity function at any given time. This means that variance is reduced, so if you want to see intra-week changes in network ownership this chart is much more than a simple 24 hour or four day pie chart. If there are very sudden changes in hashrate - for example a 50% or greater change over several hours - the smoothing method will not be able to distinguish this from variance.

Hashrate distribution: Heatmap of historical percentage of network blocks attributable to block makers.

The data in the above hashrate distribution histogram is a subset of the weekly data data below.

Hashrate distribution: Daily proportion of network for current block makers.

The next three plots group hashrate distribution into three tiers: The block makers with the largest proportion of the network, block makers with an average proportion of the network, and block makers with the smallest proportion of the network.

Because the data is a daily summary, the kernel smoothing shows quite clearly the variance in hashrate distribution that occurs in block making. It will also show the intra-week hashrate movements which were previously unavailable.

Historical centralisation of bitcoin network block creation

This chart shows the changes in the amount of the network controlled by the largest block maker, second largest, and so on up to the twentieth largest (should that number of block makers exist during the week the estimate was made).