Call for participation in a user study of Bitcoin mining visualization

[dr_pi]

http://petra.isenberg.cc/temp/MiningVis-v2.png

My Ph.D. student and I at Paris-Saclay University in France are developing a tool called MiningVis that allows people to explore the evolution of mining pools over Bitcoin history.

We are looking for people who would be interested in getting a first look at our tool while giving us feedback on its current state. If you have experience with Bitcoin mining and are interested in being one of the first to use and see our tool, please fill out the following form: https://sondages.inria.fr/index.php/147587?lang=en

The form will take you ~5 mins to complete. Out of all responses we will select 10-20 people for the first feedback round based on the diversity of their interests and background. We will contact you back in case you are selected for our study.

Thank you for your time
Petra Isenberg, Research Scientist at Inria & Paris-Saclay University
Natkamon Tovanich, Ph.D. Student at IRT SystemX & Paris-Saclay Univesity

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Passed your links onto Kano who is the operator of KanoPool. He has a ton of info, insights & experience regarding the various pools...

[Vod]

The survey itself is basic, but I'm always interested to see what people do with data!

I can't initially see the inherent value of analysing historical mining data, esp when the numbers are obsolete.  But as I mentioned in the survey, maybe the data can inspire new methods of greener mining.

[kano]

It seems to ignore the fact that blocks don't decide the size of a pool without a large sample.

The correct size of the pool will only be known by the pool itself and any public source of that information - assuming it's correct.

Block finding is random, so making assumptions about miner movements and pool sizes based on block finding can be far from accurate.
The bitcoin network itself does a difficulty recalculation every 2016 blocks based on the previous 2015 blocks.
Even that calculation has a sizeable error bar on it, and any pool with say 10% of the network would only expect to find around 201 blocks over a 2 week period.
Thus even over two weeks there's expected variance in the block finding of any pool.

e.g. my pool's record blocks found in a day was 12 - but of course that day we didn't suddenly jump up with a many times higher hash rate;
That's simple, and expected, random variance in a the bitcoin poisson distribution of block finding.