Topic: Someone just fired up some serious hashing power. (Read 8490 times)

You two are talking about two different things, Littleshop.  This wasn't the normal bump just after the difficulty change, nor was it normal statistical variance.  There were 11-12 blocks found per hour for several hours continuously.  Someone was benchmarking some serious hardware.

I still wouldn't get to worked up about it, anyway.  Whatever they had wasn't quite enough to capture the network, and since the network is always growing, their high end machine simply isn't up to snuff.

You are still ranting on me yet you are wrong.  "Did you bother to go check by yourself?" 

So again you are taking a momentary burst (which is NOT 2x the hashing power, but a normal statistical bout of good luck) and saying something is "a legitimate reason to be concerned."  This is happening often, times of 15 min blocks and times of 5 min blocks.  This is normal statistical variance. 

I want in!

My guess? Someone's ASIC based mining-farm just came online bit by bit.

My rant did not apply specifically to you, but to all people who are denying other people's claim out of cheer ill-founded optimism, and without bothering to check the facts.
I am not telling you should be pessimistic. Ill-founded pessimism is not better than ill-founded optimism.
Please, people, apply a minimum level of healthy skepticism before buying in to what you hear on this forum.
And at least refrain from denying people's fact-backed claims if you did not check the facts.
No wonder why media think that Bitcoin is a ponzy scam if they come read this forum, only to find bitcoiners herding and believing religiously whatever earlier adopters are claiming out of thin air.

You have read countless times here that the 30+ USD/BTC exchange rate was no bubble.
Yet it dropped to 20 USD/BTC, but most people were content to think it was just a correction.
Then it dropped to 10 USD/BTC, but in spite of the 66% drop in two days, people are still struggling to admit that there was indeed a bubble, that it crashed, and that it is likely to occur again.
Seriously, that does not ring a bell?


I gave you hard facts.
Did you bother to go check by yourself?
On blockexplorer between 2011-06-15 21:00:00 and 22:00:00, how many blocks do you see?
131117 (http://blockexplorer.com/b/131117) to 131128 (http://blockexplorer.com/b/131128) = 12.
Check the difficulty reported inside these blocks. 876954, right?
Now open Satoshi's paper and check the target rate for the bitcoin network : 1 block every 10 mn.
Compare the figures : 12 blocks per hour = 1 block per 5mn, VS 1 block per 10mn
=> yes, that's twice the rate, based on the available evidence (which may be broken, but that's another question).

Now, blockexplorer is maybe as broken as bitcoinwatch is.
Looking at what happened, it may have flagged as difficulty 876954 what was actually done at difficulty 607153.
But even if that was the case, that would still be a legitimate reason to be concerned.
Most people are relying on blockexplorer as a reliable source of information.
If it is broken, people should be aware about it (in particular the maintainer), and rely less on it for their decisions until it is fixed.

I read the thread and stand by what I said. 

Well it was going at about twice the normal rate, but it seems to be dropping back down close to normal now...
(Just like it has done in the past)

Must be that when a new difficulty level is set, the actual difficulty starts out at lower than the reported number, then ramps up within a day or so. That would explain the pattern we are seeing. Unless the hashrate reporting is just plain wrong.

That is a pretty serious rant responding to my pretty tame "I think everything will be ok."

Twice as fast as normal huh?

I doubt you will give me an apology even though you were wrong.

After the difficulty change the network was finding blocks at quite a fast pace for about a couple hundred blocks. Then it dropped to a rate much closer to the target rate. I'm far too lazy to provide the data, but it's all there in the block chain. I don't think this can be written off as variance. If my memory serve me correctly, it seems to be a recurring theme around difficulty changes though and it's very interesting.

I'm not sure this isn't just variance in terms of block finding.

Either that or the visit to the CIA was more successful than we thought

maybe it was this guy I havent even tried to count how many video cards there are there lol

https://i.imgur.com/626vn.jpg

Difficulty lags price, usually by a few weeks. The difficulty jumps you see now are because of the price spikes in the last few weeks. Everybody who bought mining hardware when the price went to $30 is bringing it online, which is going to fuel the next retargeting.

I don't understand why everybody assumes that just because someone uses resources at a workplace, that it is being done on the sly. For all you know the person in charge of that facility is the one responsible for them mining in their idle time. Any company that already has the equipment paid for can easily be convinced to mine. Just show them the price charts for the last 6 months.

If I worked somewhere that had 12,000 gpus I'd offer to pay the power bill for the entire facility out of my own pocket in exchange for idle mining time, and still come out *way* ahead.

I would be interested to see their reasoning on that, my calculations put the sweet spot at 20%, not 50%. In my calculations adding hash power not only devalues your existing investment, but increases the difficulty within 2 weeks. Unless your hardware is both cheaper and more energy efficient than everybody else's, it makes very little sense to expand beyond 1/5 of the mining pool.

A friend of a friend said eh?  Possibly true, but apart from the dramatically higher hash rate there has been 0% evidence of the above presented.  If true, the hash rate should drop dramatically as that system becomes non-idle, and also I don't see it lasting too long before questions are asked about power usage.  Mining with other people's hardware and electricity is the sweetest deal.  Losing your job and endangering your career is however a bit of a downer.

As I thought in earlier posts, difficulty has gone up and the next step looks even larger, yet the exchange rate has not budged at all.  Difficulty is no longer tied to the value of a BTC.  The market is well supplied with BTCs.  Most miners are no longer required.  The speculator buying into the market has no care about hardware costs, cooling, electricity, etc. 

Can you guys stop focusing exclusively on what bitcoinwatch shows you and repeat like parrots that as it used to display broken stats in the past after a difficulty change, it ough to be the one-size-fits-all explanation to anything suspicious that people report thereafter?
I am getting sick reading posts of so many people wallowing in delusion each time there is a legitimate reason to be concerned.

Go see the blockchain directly and count the blocks generated every hour.
All the hard facts are in the block chain.
If you go there and check, you will know for sure that the network is generating coins at twice the normal rate in spite of the difficulty increase.
If you don't go there, please at least stop soothing other people with fallacies and call people noobs just because they report things that don't please you.

If this is true, it made sense for them to go online right after the difficulty increase, so as not to affect said increase with the higher hashrate. It's what I would have done, at least. And I'd say in all likelihood they won't be able to keep it up for long because of a)the next difficulty increase effectively negating the increased hashing power, and b)someone will notice the increase in energy usage at the facility. Unless the one who pays the bills is in on the deal. If not, they will have to terminate their little project before the power usage is investigated.

Right. That was the premise of the scenario. I didn't say I thought it was going to happen. But if it did, then it would. You know what I mean.

I was talking about this massive hashing increase with some friends and someone mentioned that someone he knows, who runs computing for a major genetics research facility with ~3000 4x GPU servers, decided to use their idle cycles to mine and brought them online today.  Totally unsubstantiated, and hard to believe you could get away with that for very long, considering the power draw, but who knows.

Yes, and for the blocks to continue to come at twice the target rate across 28 retargetings would require that the network total hashing power double every seven days for 28 weeks.

No, I don't, and I wasn't talking about the price.  Did you bother to read the thread?