25th November weekly pool statistics

Welcome, miners.

First, some sad news. I have been spending far too much time every Sunday fixing bugs - mostly relating to HTML scraping and sometimes to do with abnormal data from pools. I can't justify the amount of time I spend on this to my family, so I have to make some hard choices.

• I will not be continuing to update stats for pools that only provides round history on a https protected page, if that pool's page starts to throw errors. If the pool wants to provide a .csv of round history, then I'll be happy to include them again.
• Any statistic or chart of which I cannot be confident I will not be continuing.

This week, we unfortunately must say goodbye to Coinotron. I hope we see them again soon, once a round history api is available. Also, I won't be including BTCGuild's hashrate per day in the hashrate per round charts, since that data is easily available from the pool's website, in a much easier to use format and with a longer history. 

In terms of charts, this week we say goodbye to the "orphaned blocks" charts. It has been pointed out to me that the data on orphaned blocks I get from many pools do not match the information compiled elsewhere. 

Hopefully, trimming down pools that require excessive time to manage and charts which may not be accurate will give me time to do some overdue code rewrites. My aim is to be able to run the scripts automatically - and right now this is not possible most of the time. I'd also like to work on a few sanity checks - I hadn't realised there could be such significant errors in timestamp reporting as there were this week, one pool reporting timestamps that were three months before the current time.

Finally, an interesting fact this week - Deepbit does not seem to be suffering from poolhopping at all as far as I can see, and the "pool hopper loss" chart (which is only an estimate) agree with this. Nice work, [Tycho]. I do hope it lasts for you.

Average hashrate:

Average hashrate = Total shares / Total round time

Weekly average round length as a fraction of difficulty:

Average number of shares submitted per round / difficulty

Figure 1: Table of all pools with public data and their various statistics averaged for the last seven days - for smaller pools the average may be more or less than seven days, depending on number of blocks solved for the week.

Figure 2: Chart of network hashrate, hashrate of the largest mining pool, combined hashrates of the three largest mining pools, and a line representing 50% of the network hashrate. Handy if you're worried about 51% attacks.

Figure 3: Chart of chronology of pool hashrates, averaged per week.

Figure 4: Chart of average hashrates per pool per round for the week.
Figure 5: Chart of chronology of negative binomial CDF probability of shares submitted and blocks produced for the week.
Figure 6: Chart of chronology of round length divided by difficulty, averaged per week.
Figure 7: Chart of hashrate vs round length for hoppable pools (the larger the hashrate increase at the start of a round, the larger the loss to strategic miners).

Figure 8: Chart of fulltime miner earnings loss at a proportional pool caused by pool hoppers, expressed as expected PPS earnings for fulltime miners. Currently only for Bitlc and Deepbit.

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