Bitcoin Forum

I just saw a big drop in hashrate, check this chart:

https://i.postimg.cc/0jRp1yVw/hash1.png

It's clearly visible from the all time chart, pretty big cut right a couple of hours ago. Upon closer inspection:

https://i.postimg.cc/GtFvLnfS/hash2.png

From 98EH/s to 63EH/s, we are looking at probably an entire farm being shut down. It's either authorities, an accident, or resetting all systems at once. Hopefully one of our chinese friends can tell us something and report back, because who else is dealing with this hashrate? I know McAffee had something going on but I doubt it's that relevant.

Looking at many other charts, I am not seeing it.
Still at about the proper 6 blocks per hour.

https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/ has it at 82.77 Eh/s
https://explorer.viabtc.com/btc has it at 82.84 EH/s
https://btc.com/ has it at 83.11 EH/s

You will always have variance and occasionally big spikes, but so long as over a few hours or a day you are at 6 blocks an hour then hashrate is about constant.

-Dave

You may want to try the below link,

https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate?timespan=60days

The hash rate drop is pretty visible! It was standing at 98,120,057 TH/s on September 22nd at 5:30 AM, which then dropped to 67,383,654 TH/s within just 24 hours! For the same period, the median transaction confirmation time has increased to 13 minutes which is highest as compared to the last two month's statistics! I wouldn't wonder if it has direct relation with the market price! 

Every place else has the rate still above 80

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-hashrate.html
https://data.bitcoinity.org/bitcoin/hashrate/3d?c=m&g=15&t=a

Yes, there was a brief drop when no blocks were found for a while. If you don't display your data properly it's going to look like that.

If no blocks are found for an hour or 2 does that mean that everyone turned off their miners.

It's variance it happens.

Over the last 24 hours average time per block is 621 seconds + / - a bit

-Dave

FUD

let the records state: you fell for FUD



all these websites will soon be reporting "oops, we all accidentally, spookily made the precise same mistake, how could that happen ???"

make of it what you will

It's actually called bad programming logic.
When you have over an hour between blocks (596266 to 596267) and then over 30 minutes to the next block (596267 to 596268) it throws off calculations that are using a too small number of blocks to calculate the hashrate.

Crappy web programmers strike again.

144 blocks (1 day) is probably the bare minimum you can use to determine hashrate and that is cutting it closer then it should be.

The full 2016 blocks (2 weeks) between difficulty changes is the only real metric that matters.

-Dave

exactly, the current estimate of the next difficulty change is:

• 48 hours
• 6% increase in difficulty

and there were exactly 144 blocks yesterday during the supposed 40% hashrate drop ::)


The people who panic sold will be feeling really, really angry/stupid once this is over. They only have themselves to blame

Price dropping like a mofo 8500

The price of all the coins in the market are dropping and i have seen many articles claiming that it is because of litecoin flash crash and then the hash rate drop, if these are FUD and if the market is going down simply because of that, then it will recover back in no time, if not i am happy to hold it for some more time until the market recovers and these drops must be considered as an opportunity for everyone to take their positions rather than panicking.

No way Litecoin could influence the market and Bitcoin, Bitcoin is the only coin that influences the market, aside maybe from Ethereum which can influence its tokens. This whole thing looks like a manipulation - hashpower swings + Bakkt + price drop in short period of time. It's very likely that we'll get back to previous levels soon.

I agree with hatshepsut93, this all looks like manipulation, but to make a move like this the traders need a lot of fuel, so, the manipulation should end short and it will get back to normal.

I would like to understand if there is some relation in the hash power drop and the price drop, it couldn't be just coincidence but i don't see the true relation at all.

It's really sad to think that a few days ago someone has posted that the hash rate is at its all time high and timed with the news about how BAKKT can be good for the industry I was really all up for it and then today I just saw one of the worst days ever since the bear market we have seen that started late December 2017. Of course that big dropped on the hash rate had triggered the price drop and we all know it decreased the market confidence of the people trading. I don't know the reason why it dropped that fast but I just hope we recover from this season before its too late and it triggers another big reversal in the market.

Agree because block discovery didnt increase heavily which would be the case if 30% mining power disapeared over night.
Question is if one entity controls around 30% minig power. That could be a little concerning.
We will see soon, all will clarify.

And the last 10 blocks that came in 596421 to 596430 were done in 36 minutes give or take a few seconds so that would put the hashrate at a little over 99 EH/s if my back of the napkin numbers are correct based on the current difficulty. So there you go.

If my numbers are way off feel free to correct me but that is what I am getting based on a difficulty of 11.9 T

-Dave

What's important is knowing what caused this. I don't believe in coincidences. Looks like the schelude is right on time for BAKKT launch. Picking up cheap coins to meet contract needs? remember that BAKKT needs to buy Bitcoin as opposed to what was out there thus far on this field. Those people could have contacts with miners. Only a big miner could have done this. I don't believe this is a mistake by a website and the rest are following. Or it just could be good ol "short the news" op.

Maybe it could be related to this:

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/09/19/1918342/0/en/Squire-Mining-Operations-Undergo-Temporary-Power-Outage.html


But then again, how big would Kazakhstan be on the mining game to make such a dip?

I read articles from CCN (https://www.ccn.com/bitcoin-hashrate-flashcrash-price-slump/), if dropping bitcoin price have correlation with bitcoin hashrates. Hashrate drop yesterday, and today bitcoin dump for 15%. May be it's true about that correlation.

Would it even be Bitcoin if people weren't overreacting to something fairly innocuous, though?   ::)

I get that the media need their attention-grabbing headlines, but are we still not past taking everything they report at face value yet?

Looks like hashrate is back up. I think the real reason is simply a lot of people wanted to sell/short, price increased quite a lot from 3.2k. Also CME (Paper bitcoin) had a lot of shorts with high open interest, that also fuels sales

Apparently, not. News outlets have been getting worse with every month that went by, but people keep donating traffic to them. They hold the golden formula to keep triggering overly sensitive perma bulls.

And then we have social media influencers who keep reporting about these articles, which only adds fuel to the fire. You can't escape from these attention grabbing articles anymore. I guess we just have to accept it and move on.

there is no evidence the hashrate ever fell

it cannot go "back up" if it did not even fall

Funny that after all these years people are still falling for Emin Gun Sirer's market manipulation-- even though his twitter is stuff full of obviously paid altcoin promotion.

Sometimes it makes me feel like people are just dying to do something stupid and only looking for an excuse...

Because mining is a noisy poisson processes it provides a never ending stream of excuses for those who hope to dare to be stupid.

they are exactly looking for an excuse. since bitcoin has turned into an speculation tool for a big percentage of those that own it, there is a lot of interest in only trading it and being volatile helps with making money.
how to help increase the volatility? by drama like this. lack of knowledge and understanding of bitcoin (which also stems from seeing it as an investment) helps with that a lot!
i don't know if we can call it stupid although it is sad to see bitcoin community is like this!

Probably some near AI used a Quantum Computer and cracked a Bitcoin-like encryption. Then a few folks found out about it, and the word quietly spread among acquaintances. It didn't actually break a Bitcoin encryption, but it broke one similar, showing that Bitcoin will be broken in the near future. Those in the know simply got scared and sold out while they could.

8)

What is the process like in order to manipulate every single hashrate chart out there without actually doing anything hashrate wise? seems a bit extreme to me.




What is the relationship between EGS and hashrate manipulation? any past precedents? I reckon reading about how this guy became yet another Gavincoin pumper.

I believe it's coordinated by a number of bad actors, not merely of Emin Gun Sirer's doing.

Plus the the trolls talk of the "drop", counter-trolls should talk of the "jump". Let's do our jobs, people. 8)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EFZNWExXsAEAH-d?format=png&name=900x900


Because plebs be plebs, we'll always at the mercy of the whalecumulators.

it's not the graphs that were manipulated, it's the interpretation of them

---

The hashrate graph are averaged predictions

They are not "the" hashrate, there is no graph of "the" hashrate.

To plot these hashrate graphs we see for Bitcoin, you look backwards in time, at x number of blocks and the time at which those x blocks were announced to the Bitcoin network.

The obvious point is, that if you choose a small number for x as your window in which to calculate the average, you get a very "accurate" (but very erratic) graph line. And so people who publish hashrate graphs usually use 3 windows; say, average over 1 day, over 3 days, and over 7 days, and put all three average lines on the same graph in different colors (I hope this sounds familiar....)


The manipulation worked like this: a long gap between 2 blocks happened on September 23rd, 1 hour and 16 minutes I believe (much longer than the 10 minute average gap). If you calculate the average hashrate over the 6 hours that contained that 1 hour-long block interval, you'll get that very erratic measurement that implies a big drop in hashrate. But if you calculated it over 12 or 24 hours, still including that very long block interval, it's barely a blip on the charts, because the long block doesn't distort the average as much when you use more data points to calculate the average.

Conversely, if you calculate the average using just 2 hours, you could say the hashrate had dropped 90% or more, and technically it's not wrong!! But if you choose a short window, your average is increasingly meaningless. Averages are all about giving disparate data points a context, there's almost no context if you're using only 2 data points!!

I mean, fuck it, if you use only 1 data point to calculate the average change, the size of the series change is 0!!! If the window you're using moves zero data points ahead, then you can calculate infinity % change in hashrate, regardless of how much it went up or down!! It's not mathematically incorrect, but it is dumb as fuck.

Maybe I'm missing something, but it looks to me like there were only 114 blocks mined on 9/23.

596163 to 596276

https://www.blockchain.com/btc/blocks/1569268006726

100EH/s at 11.8T diff should produce 170 blocks/day on average. If the nethash was actually at 100EH/s, the probability of getting <= 114 blocks is .00000319. Pretty unlikely.
90EH/s at 11.8T diff would average 153 blocks/day. Probability of <= 114 blocks is 0.000587, which is getting into the range of possibility, but still a once in a 5 year kind of event.

Calculated these numbers with this poisson distribution calculator : https://keisan.casio.com/exec/system/1180573180

Probability of getting <= X number of blocks in a day at 100EH/sec:

X    |  probability
--------------------
110 | 5.736E-7
120 | 3.248E-5
130 | 8.260E-4
140 | 0.01017
150 | 0.06519
160 | 0.2349
170 | 0.5204
180 | 0.7910
190 | 0.9400
200 | 0.9889

Probability of getting <= X number of blocks in a day at 90EH/sec:
X    |  probability
--------------------
110 | 1.574E-4
120 | 0.0033
130 | 0.0320
140 | 0.1560
150 | 0.4250
160 | 0.7307
170 | 0.9196
180 | 0.9852
190 | 0.9983
200 | 0.9999


edit: corrected to <= 114 blocks

This is a temporary phenomenon, there is always a rise behind the fall

If we calculate profitability comparing to hash rate against the price of BTC, then it is trending in negative values.

So, many user especially miners supporting BTC are moving towards alternative coins to generate with their hash power. This is the main reason behind the falling of hash rate of BTC mining.

BTC is always a prime cryptocurrency among the market, based on the SHA-256 algorithm which is supported by ASIC mining.

Next wave hash rate will be gone higher as halving is coming by next year.

People are gone out of mining industry itseems. Since seeing this chart I think we need to understand this in such way only.

There are many users on this forum were doing mining as their main and partial works but nowadays even the scam cloudmining also has been reduced. That symbolize the clear show that where the crypto mining field is staging.

I'm tired of these price swings...

you're disagreeing?



oh I see, you're not disagreeing, because you know that the rate of blocks getting discovered is probabilistic


meanwhile, difficulty adjusted yesterday. Did the the difficulty drop?

The "evidence" is circumstantial, and depends on if you think there is a greater chance that a good chunk of the nethash went down temporarily than a 0.059% chance of just having a really unlucky day for the network. I just wouldn't say there is no evidence.


Not sure what that has to do with a single day drop in nethash. If we had >114 blocks on the 23rd the difficulty would have increased more yesterday.

I know those charts do not read realtime hashrate changes and do averages. However, what are the chances that, with absolutely no negative change in hashrate, we deviated as much as 1+ hour-long block interval away from the average of 10 minutes? Wouldn't it be more likely that there was indeed a temporarily decrease in hashrate which then caused this big gap? Probabilities aside.

it's impossible to know! but let's put it another way: 45-60 minute block intervals happen fairly frequently (more than once when I've been demonstrating Bitcoin to a newbie, and as well when I've been paying for something in person!)



that's correct, the difficulty increased despite the alleged hashrate drop.

next question:

is any hashrate drop in any way meaningful if the difficulty increased at the next adjustment?

(I'm going to give you a clue, the answer begins with the letter "n", ends in "o", and is not "nintendo")

Not sure what you are getting at. Are you saying you think the number of blocks on any given day has no impact on the difficulty? Or that you don't care how much the difficulty changes, just if it goes up or down?

The block interval follows a Poisson distribution. That's why on rare occasion, no blocks will be found at all for a couple hours. The distribution evens out over time, tending back towards the 10-minute target interval.

A single 24-hour period can follow the same dynamic, with the distribution being smoothed out over the 2016-block difficulty adjustment period. Focusing too much on the short term can lead to some pretty drastic miscalculations.

With all the news of Bitcoin mining farms turning unprofitable due to the much reduced block rewards, it does not come in as a big surprise that this drop could have been due to one or more associated farms shutting down operations.

For the greater good, lets hope it was more of a prolonged maintenance break rather than a complete shut down since this is a major decrease in the hash rate all things considered.

Experts are not sure whether it is worth linking these two phenomena directly since previously significant decreases in hash rate did not significantly affect the rate. It is possible that these are just interesting coincidences. It is also possible speculative behavior of a large player who suddenly threw a large number of coins onto the market. At the moment, no one gives the exact reason for the fall.

you have no clue what you're talking about


the difficulty just went up. There was no meaningful hashrate drop, it's not possible if the difficulty increased when the supposed crash happened.


can you read? the above information is in this thread, the one you're posting in.

At this stage I'm inclined to chalk it up to ignorance and herd mentality.  Someone mistakenly thought the hash rate dropped alarmingly, not realising it was just lousy metrics.  It gets reported in the media without being fact-checked.  Speculators panic.  Snowball from there.  Lots of fuss about not much.

I hate to be Mr Contrary (or do I ;D), but the evidence for a speculator panic is also a bit thin. Normally, big price movements cause mempools to quickly fill up with panicky transactions, and especially for transaction fees to go up, that's the real sign of people sending BTC to exchanges in a panic

yet neither of these things happened, mempools have been pretty quiet, and certainly not in expensive fees territory (do you call 35 sat/byte expensive? I don't, and neither do the fee panics of 2017 and 2015)


I dunno, you could argue "segwit capacity increases stopped that", but blocks weren't alot fuller than recent averages (coming off the back of alot of 900kB blocks per 24 hour averages recently...)


So it's all thoroughly mysterious. The sort of people that leave all their BTC on exchanges are those who have personal/political connections to the owners (i.e. they get to keep their coins if there's any fraud, because they're in on the fraud). So if those people sold to create all that volume, then they got scammed by this. That sounds unlikely.


Are we really to conclude that in 2019, every idiot speculator is keeping pretty much all their BTC in their exchange account, even after Bitcoin became more well known for exchange hacks/fraud than for almost any other reason? It all sounds a little thin on credulity, no matter how you package it up

An absolute pragmatic event. I think there will be no problems in the future, but still I would like some specifics why this happened. Any information on this from trusted major sources?

The drop in the hashrate doesn't really matter since it has no effect on the market value of Bitcoin. A drop in the total hashrate of bitcoin will only affect the difficulty of mining Bitcoin.  But there is no direct relation between the fluctuations of the price of Bitcoin to the total hashrate of the entire bitcoin blockchain network...

Doesn't the hash rate affect the price because the more miners the higher the price generally of a coin, and the last miners who focus on a coin then the price goes down. The drop in hashrate is probably a negative sign for the price in the short term.

So the current Bitcoin block has taken nearly 2 hours to solve, what hashrate drop are we going to spuriously attribute this (fairly typical) event to? 75% drop? 101% maybe?

We still don't know the reason behind the fall on Bitcoin price and I am not sure about why the hash rate dropped critically if it really happened. Because various sources still say different things about hash rate.

yes we do, it's the same reason every single time: people sold faster than people bought



1 thing happened with complete certainty, the average hashrate during the supposed crash was higher than 2 weeks before. That means the "crash" doesn't matter, whether it happened or not


or to put it another way...

today, the exact same thing happened, but for some reason no-one is hyping it up. If you don't know that blocks sometimes take a long time to find, and sometimes take 5 seconds, and that doens't mean the hashrate is going crazy, but that it's completely normal, then: welcome to Bitcoin ::) it's been like this for 10 years

bingo! the only thing we know is that supply overtook demand. i dunno why people are so obsessed with rationalizing about the underlying causes of price moves.


it's incredible we are having these discussions considering difficulty is rising. :)

This big drop in hashrate is kind of unprecedented. Well not really, but despite that there have been big drops in the past, this one is pretty big compared to normal.

FTFY.  Difficulty is going up and it doesn't do that if the hash rate is plummeting.  People are jumping at shadows:

https://www.blockchain.com/en/charts/difficulty

Big drop in hashrate are overly responded to. Hashrates that drop are basically common things that have happened and it happened some time before. Overreacted because the decrease in the hash rate coincided with the decline in the price of bitcoin. Whereas the decrease in hashrate has no correlation with the decline in the price of bitcoin.

well I've said this once already this week, but it bears repeating...

the financial press have an incentive to make it seem like:

a) they know why the price moved, and which news event moved it
b) you therefore need to read the financial press to keep informed of such things


this is just self-serving nonsense, particularly when you consider that this model of disseminating information is just begging to be corrupted by big players in any market who want to send false or manipulative signalling to the readers. When there's money to be made, anyone giving you "news" or "advice" about markets is an unlikely friend. It's a game of poker, people aren't gonna show all the other players their cards and ask them if they want to swap a full house for a pair of 2's ;D

I Agree with #48. If mining wasn't profitable some people would turn their mining machines off, the hashrate would fall, difficulty will adjust so it is profitable for the miners still operating. People will then see that it is profitable to mine again, so turn their machines on and invest more into new equipment starting the whole process over again. Profitability will always tend to zero, with some lead and lag time causing variance in miner profitability. The system was designed this way to incentives the appropriate hashrate to secure whatever the current value of the network is in terms of market cap. Thanks to Satoshi Nakamoto

There was a news that Innosilicon's (mining company) data center caught fire burning around $10M worth of equipment. Though there is no public comment from the company out yet. Many people are blaming this fire for the drop of the hashrate. Also, a news came that the rainy season in northwestern part of China created a problem for one more mining company.

News source
https://cointelegraph.com/news/10m-mining-farm-fire-takes-blame-as-bitcoin-hash-rate-wobbles (https://cointelegraph.com/news/10m-mining-farm-fire-takes-blame-as-bitcoin-hash-rate-wobbles)

Hashrate is now more volative than the volatility of the BTC price. Under normal circumstances they go down and up together, but recently this is the opposite.I don't understand this thing...

There is no drop in hashrate.
In the last 24 hours there have been 148 blocks mined.
Anyone saying there is a drop in hashrate flat out does not understand mining.

As has been said before

Anything less then the 2 week (2016 block) adjustment is essentially meaningless.
But if you are really worried about it. The next thing is the 1 week number which is at 1039 which is more then the 1008 of 1 block every 10 minutes.
If you are looking at the last 24 hours, call me when it drops below 133 per day for 2 days back to back. Other than that your are just wasting time.

-Dave

If a mining farm does go offline, other miners are taking delivery of new hashing units all the time

And as has been mentioned, if the miners all push the rate too high, they have no choice but to stop because the price cannot sustain profitability at too high a difficulty


honestly, you're all apparently afraid of something you've never taken 5 minutes to think about previously

I believe some miners are speculators too. Sometimes they might take a loss now, but knowing that they will "hit gold" according to their estimates/analysis.

What makes you think it might be authorities? Because it might be in China? I'm not sure what is going on with them or what their stance is on bitcoin. Very unclear. That drop is really odd I am glad someone brought it up. I am not sure why more people didn't say something about this. I think it is as you have guessed a system crash of a farm or something like that. THats one big farm though.

 
No. The price will go up if the difficulty increases. Simple supply and demand. It will take more effort to get something it will be worth more.

I am not sure if people are afraid, it's just interesting.

Debatable if hashing power follows the price, or price follows hashing power. Normally, hashing power should follow the price. "Why would the miners add more power if it's not profitable?"

But on bull markets, or the expectation of a bull market, I believe miners speculate, and add more hashing power in anticipation of a better profit.