I wonder if the high luck recently reported by several pools is having a downward impact on price?
Can anyone extrapolate a cohesive "mining luck" formula that can be scraped or otherwise determined from the block explorer?
I've been trying to work out if the "luck factor" stat shows anything useful at all for the last couple of days, but not been getting much feedback so I'm not sure anyone cares
First of all, there are two different luck calculations being used, crypto-pool.fr and cryptonotepool.org.uk implemented one based on calculating (hashes to find block) / (block difficulty), the Zone117x released a pool update which included a luck calculation based on (block difficulty) / (hashes to find block). I may well be biased but I prefer the former as I believe it produces more easily comparable results, take a look at the sites to see what you think. The standard pool method produces exponential results, and I havent see any of the sites using it trying to explain what their "285% luck factor!" actually means, other than the implied bigger is better.
After pondering here's what I believe you need to consider when looking at luck scores:
- I prefer to refer to it as "efficiency" rather than luck, when using my pool's calculation method 100% efficiency should be average for the network
- Network difficulty lags behind the actual network hash power, so when it is increasing miners should overall be luckier than the implied average
- The difficulty is time based, aiming to set the mining efficiency at a level which produces a block every 60secs on average. However the pool efficiency calculation isnt time based, as it assumes 100% uptime, pool downtime wont affect the efficiency displayed
- When all other factors are equal, i.e. difficulty remains constant and pools have no downtime, then the efficiency across all pools should average 100%. If some pools are consistently over 100% then that must be at the expense of some other pools running at less than 100%.
To answer your original question, unfortunately the block explorer doesnt record hashes required per block, so you cant get a luck factor that way. You could look at the average block generation time to see if it is 60secs as intended, if it averages much lower then the coins generated per day will be higher than expected, which could affect price.