Bitcoin Forum

Most pools have had their fair share of bad luck over their runtime, but I wonder what is the all time worst recorded hashrate / difficulty of any pool recorded so far? ozcoin is having an exceptionally bad run right now with almost 12 million shares on their current block over the current difficulty of 1192498. Of course one block is no marker for how a pool will perform after that...

It would be quite nice if people helped get them out of this rut.

Strange, I cannot find shares for actual round on ozcoin. Where did you find it's near 12mil?

To your question:

* 1.19 mil is not the worst shares-per-block, I think my pool still keep the record in absolute numbers with 12.5 mil shares (with difficulty around 1.5mil)

* It's even not the worst block from side of shares/difficulty ratio. The worst ratio I'm aware on my pool was 12.33x difficulty, it was sometimes in January during connection issues of pool server so it's very likely that some valid submits has been lost. However the difficulty was around 20k, so it wasn't *so* strange in absolute numbers.

* Such long rounds are less likely, but not impossible. Time to time every pool is just unlucky. 10+ mil shares has been on all pools I'm watching.

You have to be logged in to view shares towards current block.

Right now ozcoin is at 11,761,558 shares. 9.8x difficulty

12.3x difficulty has to have hurt. I was  speaking specifically of shares/difficulty since that correlates most strongly with the worst luck.

I think back in the early 1M (may have been a bit higher than now though), BTC Guild had a 13m round, and Deepbit had a 14 or 15m round.  Similar to Ozcoin, although I can't remember the exact difficulty when it happened.  I do know it was fun to watch the difficulty estimate since these two "uber rounds" happened only a day or so apart with the two largest pools.

I remember some months ago the first really long round at slush's - 9+ hours, and everyone was thinking that pool is broken (but it wasn't).

Since then I was better prepared for this.

Yeah I remember deepbit's uber long round, but I think that was when difficulty was closer to 2mill.

Anyway poor ozcoin's round isn't over yet so we'll see how this one pans out for them  :-\

I remember joining slush's pool.... of course, an uber-long round came right when that happened.

Wow - 12 million shares.

At PPS, even paying a small amount like  0.00003 per share would end up costing the pool almost 400 bitcoins.  No wonder so many new pools fail!

Yeah I gave that as one of the reasons to reduce the BTC block time (and block payment) to 2min/10BTC :)
No one liked that idea ...

Variance.
Even now at the current difficulty of over 1mil, variance is just way too high for a new (small) pool with a low hash rate, to consider starting.
Most should expect to fail.

There are almost no true PPS pools now. Most just delay payments until "buffer" is refilled during positive luck.

Well, at bitminter.com we are still hashing our 6th consecutive unlucky block from 24 hours:
http://bitminter.com/stats/luck (http://bitminter.com/stats/luck)

mm dunno, got 7 blocks on oct 25th, then a "normal" run till 9nov , then the 12M share round, yep we have had good luck and bad...
ahh the joys of bitcoin mining and variance :)

Actually - deepbit had a > 27% bad luck run yesterday my time ... even big pools can be hit by the variance.