Bitcoin Forum

Anyone buying that figure? It was just at ~10 Thash/s, and it would take a ton of new miners online to cause it to jump so much in a day.
And the difficulty rate changed days ago, so it's not skewed from that. What's up?

Someone at Nintendo decided to see if the Wii U could handle poclbm.

(Sorry, couldn't resist...)

21 blocks in the last hour alone. Holy f'n Christ on a cracker. Guess someone finally got their ASICs (or fpgas) online. If this rate is sustained, next difficulty jump will be in ~ 28 hours, and is probably going to be a helluva lot more than 40%.

Of course this could just be normal variance as well. We'll know in a few hours.

The standard answer I have seen is that the Statistics go out of whack briefly when the difficulty goes up. Presumably the calculation assumes that all previous (N) blocks were of the same difficulty.

Edit: I stand corrected.

Newegg got a very large shipment of 5830s in last week. I got mine today, likely a lot of other people did as well. Could partly explain it.

The difficulty didn't go up today or yesterday though, right?

Did something break? lol.

I think the better question might be, is anything still working?   ;)

I think a time traveler from 2028 brought his new PS8 and plugged it in.

Why are there no more for the last 30 minutes, according to that site? Am I missing something?

edit:

2 just appeared but there is still a big gap.

Maybe he's on 56k and his mom had to use the phone.

hmmm 13 blocks (13433-13455) over a period of exactly 30 minutes (01:29-01:59)...Curiouser and curiouser.

I think it just became self aware!

love those 50 BTC blocks.

it could be a supercomputer lending some its time for BTC mining or maybe someone knows something.....

This is probably really stupid even wondering this but I thought I'd mention it anyway.  I saw this on youtube yesterday: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNcOcan1B2c (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNcOcan1B2c).  I flagged it as spam/scam because... well, duh.  Surely it's not true...???!!?!  ::)

crazy shit! btc is exciting.

uh-oh

Does nobody understand statistics and probabilities here?

Would you say a roulette wheel was rigged if it came up black 10 times in a row?  Even worse, would you bet heavily on red for the next spin?

Every single block generation is a separate occurrence, estimates of total hashing speed are based on a very simple formula for average time to solve a block over X number of blocks vs current difficulty.  A lucky string or two of quickly solved blocks will make it look like hashing power went through the roof.  An unlucky string of blocks taking an hour to solve would make it look like hashing power dropped off considerably.

I would say it is rigged if someone empties the casino and a couple day later the roulette wheel 'coincidentally' comes up black a highly unusual number of times in a row.

It's most likely not actually 14 terahashes. Bitcoincharts says it is 14 terahashes due to those 7 blocks found in like 10 minutes. The number on the site is just an estimate, if 100 blocks were solved in the next minuted, the estimate would be like over 100terahashes. It sucks that we don't have a way to actually calculate the REAL hash rate of the whole network :(

It does seem that some real power is being added to the system. More than a few cards.

I heard from my friend at RIT that someone had hacked (?) into their computing cluster and was using it to mine Bitcoins. I'm not sure if they have GPUs set up for that, and I think it happened earlier in the day. So maybe it's something else?

it seems people take well to casino examples.. here is one about the martingale betting strategy and roulette. taken from wikipedia.

The odds of losing a single spin at roulette are q = 20/38 = 52.6316%. If you play a total of 6 spins, the odds of losing 6 times are q6 = 2.1256%, as stated above. However if you play more and more spins, the odds of losing 6 times in a row begin to increase rapidly.
In 73 spins, there is a 50.3% chance that you will at some point have lost at least 6 spins in a row. (The chance of still being solvent after the first six spins is 0.978744, and the chance of becoming bankrupt at each subsequent spin is (1-0.526316)x0.021256 = 0.010069, where the first term is the chance that you won the (n-6)th spin - if you had lost the (n-6)th spin, you would have become bankrupt on the (n-1)th spin. Thus over 73 spins the probability of remaining solvent is 0.978744 x (1-0.010069)^67 = 0.49683, and thus the chance of becoming bankrupt is 1-0.49683 = 50.3%.)
Similarly, in 150 spins, there is a 77.2% chance that you will lose at least 6 spins in a row at some point.
And in 250 spins, there is a 91.1% chance that you will lose at least 6 spins in a row at some point.

I think the block solve rate can likely be approximated by a Poisson distibution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution), where λ is equal to about 6  expected blocks per hour.(assuming no difficulty increase).

Entering the values into the formula, I get a probability of 0.04130 that 10 blocks are solved in a given hour. 4.1% is not an exceedingly rare event, likely happening every day (more precisely, every 24 hours, 12 minutes on average).

But what is the probability of 7 blocks in 10 minutes?

To check a smaller interval, you would need to adjust λ to match. In this case a λ of 1 occurrence per 10 minute interval is equivalent to 6 in an hour used earlier. You then use a value of k=7 occurrences during that time. That works out to a probability of 7.30x10^^-5. I would expect an occurrence like that to happen (on average (can the Poisson distribution be applied recursively?)) once every 95 days or so.

I saw this video too. I thought about making a post about it. But after looking at the video it just looks like a photoshop hack. Or maybe someone changed the code in the miner to that it would appear that to have a speed increase. Its fake, no worries.

It looks like a statistical anomaly as others have suggested. I'm in the btcguild pool, and we found 8 blocks in a one hour period earlier (according to btcguild our luck in the past 24 hours is +27.3%) but our pool is still at only a bit over 2 t/hashes. I expect to see that number on bitcoincharts.com drop significantly tomorrow unless the lucky streak continues. I really doubt 5 new thashes/s of processing power came online at just about the same time we had our crazy lucky streak ;)

READ THIS BEFORE GOING THERE!
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=20974.msg263339#msg263339

Not only the whole network go up in speed, but even existing miners have increased in output. I got in less than 24 hours, double my daily return (even the one calculated at 10 blocks/hour).

Yeah, me too. I call "luck streak", not "government supercluster takeover end of world".

Maybe a large corp decided to devote some processing time to mine and pile some coin as an investement :D

I know last night, BTC Guild alone found 8 blocks in a 1 hour period, start to finish (9 if you count the one that finished at the start of the hour).  That was at ~2.3 TH/sec.  I know a few other pools had some similar luck overnight.

I'd wait a while before I start claiming a massive jump in overall network speed, considering that 1 hour alone for BTC Guild was equivalent to what would take 4 hours on average.

As of right now, Bitcoin charts is listing 10.859 Thash/s. So it looks like it was just a lucky streak.

Power unplugged?  ;D

An ABC IT worker has reportedly dragged the public broadcaster into a virtual currency money making racket and a "serious misconduct case" is underway.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/secret-money-abc-virtual-currency-racket-probe-20110623-1ggp6.html#ixzz1Q4V1V48M

lol and the IT crackdowns begin... across the country IT workers lose high paying jobs and get sued for theft of company resources cuz they tried to mine a 100$ worth of bitcoins.

Just became a new addiction criteria (http://www.bitcoinaddict.com/?p=240)

Re:OP : Yes, just a temporary increase from good mining luck. Nice to know. But hashing power is still rising by the day. That's some good hash!