September 28th 2014 Weekly Hashrate Contributor and Network StatisticsOther Weekly Hashrate Contributor and Network Statistics postsWelcome, miners.
Changelog:
Nil.
Errors:
Discus Fish still seem to update their data irregularly. Until they update more regularly, their data in the second table , and for figure 4, 5 and 7 will only be based on that subset.
Notifications:
Nil.
0. Private mining companies now account for 36% of the network.
I noticed that of the top seven places this week, one was for the unknowns, three for pools and three for known private companies. In all this accounts for 36% of the network. Pools are generally open about the blocks they've solved, and I would like to see companies like Megabigpower to follow the lead of Cointerra and sign all their blocks, not just some of them. Providing a list of solved blocks would be a nice step, too.
It's not a perfect system and people who care about the network's health will need to be vigilant and check that none of the "unknowns" can be attributable to a known mining company/pool, but as mining continues to centralise reducing the proportion of unknown blocks will become even more important to the network's health. Ideally, I would like to see it remain between 2% and 4% - enough for solominers to keep an anonymous piece of the action but not enough to allow any large known company to fifty-one percent the network (that's right, "fifty-one percent" is a verb now, just waiting for it to get into the Oxford English Dictionary"), or to significantly improve their "selfish mining" capacity.
1. Discus Fish and GHash.io battle royale part 4.
... and GHash.io gets the crown back.
2. Network contracted this week
The network hashrate is lower than it was last week and is actually the lowest (1078 blocks this week) it hash been since late July (1038 weekly blocks). Will we see a reduction in the network mining difficulty? The short answer is "no". The somewhat longer answer is "there will be no significant continued reduction in the network mining difficulty in the short term, even if the price halves" (I accept no responsibility for financial loss due to use of this information).
3. Got the new machine set up
I can hear it in the background, purring away quietly, not that screaming death rattle that the macbook used to have when I asked it to do anything more than just sit there and look pretty. Hopefully the money I spent on new machine will be money well spent.
Explanation of the tables and charts.
Table 1: Solved block statistics. 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 from either coinbase signatures, known generation addresses or claimed by a particular pool block history. Includes non-Pool hashrate contributors. 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.
"Unknown" is not an entity, but simply the group of blocks to which I cannot give attribution using the methods given above.
Table 2: Pool reported block history statistics. This table lists all statistics that can be derived from the number of blocks a hashrate contributor has solved for the past week using all solved blocks - both valid and orphaned - and difficulty 1 shares per round.
A much more accurate estimate of the hashrate, confidence intervals are unnecessary.
Orphan races lost, and percentage of solved blocks that were not added to the blockchain.
"Luck" is the usual difficulty 1 equivalent shares per round / mining difficulty, or (equivalently) accepted shares / expected shares.
CDF: The cumulative density function (CDF) measures the percentage of the time this number accepted shares / expected shares would be less than the calculated value, given the number of valid + invalid blocks.
Bitcoin per Gigashare. This figure is not an indicator of how much a miner should have expected per one billion Difficulty 1 shares (or one thousand difficulty megashares, etc), since it doesn't take into account the reward method or fees charged. Rather, it should be considered as a "luck" index that also incorporates the number of orphaned blocks and the current reward per block.
Since BTC Guild doesn't report shares per block but does report transaction hashes for all blocks, luck calculations cannot be calculated but orphaned blocks can. Pools such as "Discus Fish" that don't have a public pool interface cannot be included.
Figure 3: Percentage of blocks solved each week for the current top ten contributors.
Data is calculated from the number of blocks each contributor added to the blockchain during the week. The points are the actual data; the lines are exponentiated smoothing splines of the log of the data.
You can view all previous charts at
http://organofcorti.blogspot.com.au/search/label/weeklypoolstatistics and other posts and fun things at
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