I'd say that your question is incorrect. Why was?

My bet is that 2009-2013 will be in history books as the "Golden Age" of mining.

Sometimes people do not see the forest behind the trees, don't they?

87. Upon reading this you think, "nahhh PUE of 2 sucks".

lol, that actually has happened to me.

LOL, and now they create a zillion 0.01 bids with 0.001 step. Are they trying to hide/distort order book or something. Weird indeed, never saw something like this on mtgox yet.

At one point today those multiply 3 and 4 digit bids have indeed taken out all asks, so that only 500 bitcoins left on ask side. Buyers simply did not go insane and made a pause to let sellers to recuperate a bit. Though it does not seem like their buying appetite is satisfied just yet.

Let's wait and see.

less than 1000 bitcoins left for sale below 20

LOL, somehow I cannot find the original thread. Hence here is the new one. Let's see if we can repeat the trick and have 3500% rally we had during that previous thread.

Nice little bidding war is going on right now. Quite a few 3 and 4 digit bids competing for sellers attention right now. I am  wondering how long will it last.

I know.

But so is volatility, and who is equipped here to manage risks minute by minute. Surely, not me.

Perhaps you can be better off looking for someone to buy puts from.

Yep it would need 3x USD collateral, with margin call option.

I'd love to give such a loan. Unfortunately, though, I see no practical way for me to do so and mitigate all the risks involved to my satisfaction. Only with sufficient collateral maybe.

Thank You for the data.

So basically, we have 21.4221% probability of 'at most' 1462 blocs found while 1493.16 blocks are expected. This is well in the realm of possibility. Just like tossing a coin 2986 times and getting 1462 heads.

If we take only two last 'unlucky' periods than we have expected number of blocks 649.32 and actual 619 with probability of 'at most' 619 blocks found 12.0440%.

for whatever it worth.

Why do you people talk about all kinds of irrelevant stuff (from math point of view)?

Fact 1.


That is it!. Total hashrate of the network is not important, total hashrate of somebody's mining rig or pool is not important. There are not even any standard deviations involved, even though some math geniuses above imply that without it everything is lost.

Basically, everything but the above 3 variables is utterly irrelevant.

Fact 2.


If any of that is above your head, here is simpler way to think of it.

If during some period of time when D is diffuculty and N1 is diff1 shares submitted to a pool, than expected number of blocks solved B1 = N/D.

Number of blocks found B2 is known.

Push B1 and B2 into poisson formula and you get probability. Again this calculator http://www.sbrforum.com/betting-tools/poisson-calculator/ will give you all the probabilities you want based on B1 and B2.

Think about D diff1 shares accepted by the pool as two coin tosses where head means block solved and tail means not solved. On average it should be one block solved per every <difficulty> shares. As simple as that.

Now... if we have 12 mil shares without a solved block and difficulty is 2 millions (or 6 mil shares with difficulty of 1 million) it is essentially the same as tossing a coin 12 times in a row and getting only tails. Not impossible, but what are the odds? (about a quarter of one percent actually)

Large pools should really be dead on target over any given ~2 week constant difficulty period (so far at least).

Fact 3


Having said that, expectation of finding 133 blocks is stated by OP. I have no idea where he got this number from and since it is not derived by him from difficulty and number of diff1 shares but using some other method, which I do not understand, it is a highly suspect number.

Just to clarify. Basically, my math (rounded to integer) shows that when we expect 133 blocks and 105 get solved it means that:

99% chance that here is either malicious activity or technical glitch or both (I have no idea which one it is)
1% chance that it is simply bad luck.

1% chance shall not be discounted since it is something that happens on about every 100th try.

However, no matter whether it is malicious or technical glitch these are equally good reasons to jump the ship unless one wants to play with odds stacked against him.

If someone would like to make his own DD, simply break available data over difficulty periods. You would need number of shares submitted for each difficulty period. Than divide this number of shares by difficulty, it will be your expected number of solved blocks for the period. Sum all the expected blocks for all the periods. Now you have both expected number of blocks and actual one. The longer time period you use the better.

Than read up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution or if you really lazy (like me) use one of online calculators like http://www.sbrforum.com/betting-tools/poisson-calculator/

Simply enter expected and actual blocks there and see 'at most' number. This will be a chance of pool finding at most so many actual blocks for given number of expected ones.

All you need to know for this calculation is number of shares and difficulty and number of actual blocks found.

+1 Maged.

Yep,  it could be a great way of creating nice plausible deniability for themselves.

What a biz model:
1. Become a depositary institution (i.e. bank)
2. Accumulate lots of deposits (do not charge any meaningful fees for the service)
3. Rob yourself
4. Tell everyone that half of money gone, pay half out
5. Profit


Rule of thumb for punters: if someone offers to safely keep your money and do not want to charge for it, it is too good to be true.

There is not enough data to make conclusions. For 11 million shares (5.7 blocks expected, at most  1 found) probability is about 2% i.e. this is expected to happen every 50*11 = 550 million shares or so.

It is when we are talking about hundreds of blocks the probabilities could get much more damning quickly due to law of large numbers.

If we assume that you are correct on expectation of 133 while only 105 blocks found (I have not checked it) than probability of finding at most 105 blocks out of expected 133 is 0.6952%. This is rather high certainty i.e. more than 99.3% that something is badly wrong there. I'd suggest anyone to jump the ship ASAP (I would).

Check out http://mining.mainframe.nl my math shows that no cheating going on there.

On longer time period it is very easy to spot cheating. Take as long period as you have data for. Calculate expected number of blocks solved, calculate actual number of blocks solved. It should converge. The law of large numbers is working. A few such bad streaks as described above and certainty that a pool is cheating quickly goes over 99.99%.

This model is way too simplistic. There are not even bull and bear traps present. I'd say that we have classical bear trap here during 'smart money' stage.

How do you justify your present half a million dollar valuation? Does your power point presentation worth that much or is there something else?

Yep, dumping one day average volume in one minute is real smart move. Those bitcoins must be really burn holes in somebody's pants.

If I was an agent investigating recent heists, the first thing on my to do list would be to subpoena(or whatever) mtgox on identity of the seller.