How much has the last month of bad luck and not finding a lot of blocks got to do with variability, or is it that the price of btc has been high for some time so a lot of new miners are joining and increasing the overall hashrate? I include myself in that group by the way!
Could it be that there is simply more hash in total, and therefore the blocks are spread a lot more thinly?
It's been a run of bad luck.
The statistics on the Blocks page show that.
I do monitor luck at a much lower level - individual miner luck and other types and groupings, and keep track of who gets very bad (and very good) luck, to be sure it's not something else causing it.
I will go as far as to claim that this pool is the only pool that monitors it at the level I do.
Most pool OPs don't even understand the statistical analysis of mining data ... while many pools don't even care to try to monitor it with their pool.
The stats are not below what can be expected - and I show them all clearly, at the pool level, there on the Blocks page, so anyone else can get a reasonably good idea of the probabilities of the results.
While luck itself does not try to correct itself, it is as pseudo-random as sha256 can be, the good luck months clearly show what bad luck is also reasonable.
April being a month of 147.47% means that the reverse is also possible.
What I mean by this is that if the pool is able to get a run of good luck that high, for that many blocks, and of course everyone will be happy if we get that, and of course not consider it means something is wrong with the pool, then that also means the reverse is also reasonable.
The reverse of 147.47% is 1/1.4747 = 67.81% luck - which last December was a little above.
Again, I'm not at all saying that luck corrects itself, what it is expected to always do is converge to 100% from above or below,
but the actual good luck accomplished can show what can be considered reasonable bad luck also by inverting it - i.e. we aren't out in the realms of improbability.
I guess one thing that is an issue is the fact that while the Bitcoin difficulty has been rising so high, the pool hash rate hasn't been increasing at that same rate to keep up our expected daily block value.
This doesn't mean that we expect lower luck, it means that since the pool's hash rate % of bitcoin is going down, we can expect higher variance.
Yes today a 90PHs pool is considered a small pool - only an expected 1.6 blocks a day out of the total of 144 blocks a day, or 1.111% of Bitcoin.
But to be blunt, the lower % pool hash rate has been caused by Bitmain.
Many miners, small, medium and large, have been unable to get the miners they wanted to buy for the last 6 months.
Bitmain has been building their farms and keeping their miners. They are the worst competition of everyone buying miners from them. When Bitmain sees it's a lot more profitable to mine than to sell miners, that's what happens.
Hopefully Canaan will have something to solve that soon
