Bitcoin Forum

Dispite the difficulty jump this morning, the average blocks per hour has been rising steadily all day, and now stands at 12 blocks per hour according to bitcoinwatch.com.  Looking at the pie chart, it's definitely in the 'other' section, which has nearly taken half of the pie chart from it's normal position of less than 5%.

Holy crap! That does not bode well for us.

Is this from that guy a while back who said he was contracted all exclusively and hush-hush-like to do an FPGA miner for a company that had a bunch of FPGAs left over from Wall Street stuff? Or did *everyone* buy more hardware when the price spiked to $30 and it's all starting to come online?

Miners, status report!

it's the illuminati, rockefeller and world bank assoiciations! they want back the total control...

Me and a couple of buddies are sharing a 100 GH/s farm for solo mining :/

Meep.
I have nothing to add - just trying to work out how this'll affect the market.

Considerations:
1) Rate seems to go down at weekends (easier to sell, than buy I guess). Had been intending to sell now and then re-buy when the drop came.
2) Difficulty spike 'should' make coins value go up, I think price/difficulty has always roughly held.
3) Last week has been 'disruptive' - firstly somebody dumping their early coins and slamming the market, and now somebody minting them insanely.
4) Guess this all boils down to whether bitcoins will 'make it' and have 'value' - So far this has been a bubble perpetuated by us. If one person rolls up and takes all the coins, then I'm reasonably sure a fair few of us will drift away. Mr custom-chip (I love conspiracy) will have a shit-load of coins in a market that's losing interest. What will he do - he'll dump them. Personally I think if this happens, it's over.
5) Mt Gox market. Just looking at the spread, there are an awful lot more sellers than buyers. Maybe this is because buyers just rock up and pay what the market is asking, whilst sellers will leave high offers standing - but it's not a healthy supply/demand distribution.
6) What do we do with bitcoins? Putting aside I have a few of them I'd like to sell for untold wealth, really? For a purely anonymous transaction, they're dandy - but this is surely a very rare transaction? Even on SR (which it vanishing can't help the price of BC) it can only protect the seller - whilst giving no protection to the buyer. At least if one were to mail off cash you'd have a clue where to go if ripped off.

What a bunch of n00bs.

Seriously, though...

You have to ignore those figures for at least 24 hours after a reset. It's an easy mistake to make, I'll admit. I wondered what the heck was going on the first time I saw it -- but I assumed something was messed up.

They'll level out over the next 24-36 hrs, Relax people

The stats are, as mentioned, off the mark after retarget. Probably because they are a mix of realtime data pulled from pool APIs combined with an estimate based on blocks generated over time – which is why "other" always seems to wait to power up a few thousand GPUs until right after the difficulty has gone up.

The network data are incorrect following a difficulty jump.  It will take 24-48 hours to report accurate information.

Bah - I like excitement.
I have no idea what I'm doing, but that almost adds to the fun.
CPU mined BC bought my rig - but difficulty rampings really take the fun out of it.
My 6990 would give me 2.5BC a day, so I bought another one. Day it arrived the pair just served up 2.3. Deepbit is seemingly telling me I'll now just get 1.3 a day... Yes, yes I can break even still, but *wavy-hands*  

This suggests that some well heeled personalities are stress testing the system.


I'll give you $10 for each of your's and then you can go take your Zoloft.


Really?  You suffer from a serious lack of imagination, and seem to be heavily influenced by the BS media reports.  Does anyone really think that the feds have the resources to monitor the outgoing shipments of these vendors?  Do you people watch too much TV?  What do you think happens?  They set a stakeout of the guy's front mailbox?  No, these guys have runners that move the shipments to various dropboxes and post offices.  The cops don't have teh resources to follow them all, so the only reall option that they have is to arrest the runner, but then that tells the vendor that he is being watched, and he suspends business activities.  Nor does the government have the resources to intercept mail in route.  And if they started doing that often, UPS would start complaining openly about the cost burdens.  This kind of mail smuggling has been going on for decades.  The only new addition is Bitcoin.

There was an address that went up and started mining @45GH on Eligius though: http://eligius.st/~artefact2/eu/1E8jPYas4iJGTrpwfgRgigjRmjGFNqtcuF

It's quite impressive.

Even if the stats are off for the difficulty change, it is an interesting topic to discuss.  What are the effects if large farms come online.  From gov't.?  Private companies? Wall street?  hackers?

The effects of each should be discussed for security reasons. 

I would prefere to believe your soothing words.
But I am sorry to tell you you are wrong.

Look at blockexplorer.
12+ block per hour (for instance block 131117 to 131128 were all found between 2011-06-15 21:00:00 and 22:00:00).
And all these blocks were generated at difficulty 876954

There really is at least twice as much hashing power now than before the difficulty increase, and the network is minting twice as many bitcoins an hours as expected.

Whoever jumped in doesn't mind being noticed.
At any rate, that's a very strange strategy.
Whether you want to take over the block chain to control the currency, or make tons of money by forerunning everybody, you'd better get in progressively if you don't want to frighten everyone and end up with full control over a left over currency.

The only reasons I can see are :
- this new joiner wants to ruin bitcoin, so the fact of being noticed and make people panic is part of the plan.
- this is an agressive IPO from a government or a financial institution who wants to be able to claim ownership of bitcoin at a later stage (hence must have some evidence that it is indeed controlling half of the computationnal power).
- the guy is greedy to the point where he doesn't care being noticed so long as he makes more money.

There should be a sticky on the topic of total hashing power, difficulty, and how they are calculated, and how the stats are skewed shortly after difficulty changes.

Well, at the time of this posting, blockexplorer.com shows 12 blocks in the last hour. Isn't the target rate 6 per hour? My simple mind wants to infer that the hash rate is twice what it was when the difficulty adjustment was computed. Not something that can merely be the artifact of a bad estimation technique, is it?

Someone at the CIA decided he could throw some hashing power into his/her pocket.  Idle CPU time. heh.

wow. toss a coin 20 times. you expect 10 heads and 10 tails. but why did you get 15 heads? oh no, the world is coming to an end.

I'm not a noob, and I checked for a disfunctional statistic.  I'm used to it being off for quite a while after a difficulty adjustment, but as I was watching it, the stats were rising instead of adjusting.  And I still waited for four hours to mention it because I wasn't sure.

The target rate is, indeed, 6 per hour.  The difficulty adjustment would have dropped that rate down very close to 6 if not for a sudden near doubling of the hashing capability of the network.

Factoid: if hash rate keeps outstripping difficulty adjustments such that blocks are generated at 12/hour instead of 6/hour, then the 210000th block happens sooner than otherwise projected, 9 months from now.

I kind of welcome it because the lower rate of bitcoin generation will create a smaller rate at which BTC are dumped for cash by those who mine to cash out immediately. More pressure for BTC appreciation. I don't expect it will unless more than one large scale FPGA/ASIC outfit comes in. It was ArtForz or someone associated with one such I recall said they would only scale up to no more than 1/2 of total hash rate because beyond that they are competing with themselves and experience diminishing returns. If more than one comes in, then all bets are off. They could squeeze the GPU miners down to nothing.

So in 9 months, only 25 coins are generated per block rather than 50, at some previously forecasted rate?

But with the doubling of miners and network hashing power recently, that will be more like 3-4 more months?

This bitcoin business is very interesting : )  Higher difficulties + lower block values rapidly changing the market.   

11 months early?  How did you get there?

Came to think of something else, as I've already brought up deviations in stats... I noticed the stats on bitcoinwatch go down to less than 3 blocks/hour before retarget, and as I remember it the network graph followed. That did also look weird, and did not seem to have much to do with the actual block generation rate.

Actually that "Other" are my 300 servers in the office, just switched from -bigadv folding to mining so no worries people. All I need is 40000 BTC and I will turn them off.


 ;D ;D ;D ;D


(Hope no one believes me here)

ROFL!!

Did you notice that the block count had stopped on bitcoin watch prior to the difficulty change? I would imagine that was affecting the other stats. Some time around the difficulty change it was corrected or started counting again.

Yeah, maybe I screwed up the arithmetic.

210000 - 131,159 = 78841 blocks away

78841 / (12 blocks/hour) = 6570 hours away = 273.75 days

273.75 days / (365.25 days/year)   =  0.74949 years

0.74949 years * 12 months/year = 8.99 months.

So 9 months.

So you are assuming that the hashing power doubles every retarget, which would happen every week, for the next nine months.

I see. 

Care for an over/under bet on that?

A little birdie told me there's more coming. Expect another difficulty change in 5 days or so. Enjoy the ride with those inefficient multi gpu rigs   :D

No, I'm not. In my message to which you replied, I said: "if hash rate keeps outstripping difficulty adjustments such that blocks are generated at 12/hour instead of 6/hour, then...". 

You need to wait longer.

That being said, the price is holding steady.  I think everything will be ok.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

I read the thread and stand by what I said. 

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 (http://blockexplorer.com/b/131117)) to 131128 (http://blockexplorer.com/b/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.

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

I want in!

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. 

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.