Really Interesting Things Happening Today.

[cakir]

First there were no blocks found for 1 hour 20 minutes.
https://blockchain.info/block-height/352792 & https://blockchain.info/block-height/352793

Secondly, Most of last found blocks are "731 kb each".
https://blockchain.info/block-height/352792
https://blockchain.info/block-height/352793
https://blockchain.info/block-height/352794
https://blockchain.info/block-height/352795
https://blockchain.info/block-height/352796
https://blockchain.info/block-height/352797
https://blockchain.info/block-height/352800


Bonus: TripleMining found 2 blocks with 160-200 THS
https://blockchain.info/blocks/TripleMining

What's really happening? I don't think that's ordinary, it's strange.

edit: Also Slush's pool couldn't find a single block for 18 hours with around 16 PHS...

[1715584678]

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[crazyearner]

More likely that people moving their hash power about and things beginning to slow down due to profit being so little if anything and people focusing on alt coins with mining. Turned my units off long time ago due to spikes in diff and been un profitable. But it is indeed interesting to see no blocks been generated maybe this sign of things to come ahead. Who knows will only wait and find out in the coming weeks if it continues to happen or maybe just random and bad luck on pools.

[cakir]

Well, diff is 47.6 billion now.
according to: https://alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator
Next difficulty retarget occurs at block 354815.0 (eta 10.7 days): 64127512385.0 / +34.7% [est.] ( I know it can't be more than 25% )

And this one;


I don't think people just shifted their miners. Some people are manipulating the network I think...

[Jamphone]

If you think the network hashrate is about to jump 30% in one difficulty adjustment the crack you're smoking is too strong. (Yes its happened before, but I'll bet 500:1 it doesn't happen in the next 3 months.)

[cakir]

If you think the network hashrate is about to jump 30% in one difficulty adjustment the crack you're smoking is too strong. (Yes its happened before, but I'll bet 500:1 it doesn't happen in the next 3 months.)

You're a fucking retard who doesn't read the entire post.

@BlindMayorBitcorn
it's quite bad actually...

[crazyearner]

Well, diff is 47.6 billion now.
according to: https://alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator
Next difficulty retarget occurs at block 354815.0 (eta 10.7 days): 64127512385.0 / +34.7% [est.] ( I know it can't be more than 25% )

And this one;


I don't think people just shifted their miners. Some people are manipulating the network I think...

If people are indeed manipulating the network then what is to say that could also manipulate other things. Wonder if this might be a new attack than forcing market values down and manipulating blockchain to try pushing diff in different directions. Seen it happen a while back with TRC and hit it hard and since then never recovered and most exchanges are removing it as theirs next to no activity on that coin any more after hackers got away with tuns of coins. Could be something or nothing. Will have to wait to see what happens again in a few weeks.

[notlist3d]

Well, diff is 47.6 billion now.
according to: https://alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator
Next difficulty retarget occurs at block 354815.0 (eta 10.7 days): 64127512385.0 / +34.7% [est.] ( I know it can't be more than 25% )

And this one;


I don't think people just shifted their miners. Some people are manipulating the network I think...

In what way do you think network is being manipulated?  I think network is so big manipulating it would take a big player.  You could rent miners to shift hash, but it would be expensive long term.

I think biggest factor is price of BTC.  We should see a lot of old gear come offline eventually, such as A1's.

One thing everyone needs to remember is that luck can play a factor in mining.  Should a pool with 160-200 THS get 2 block's in a day? No....  but with luck it is not impossible.

[philipma1957]

Well, diff is 47.6 billion now.
according to: https://alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator
Next difficulty retarget occurs at block 354815.0 (eta 10.7 days): 64127512385.0 / +34.7% [est.] ( I know it can't be more than 25% )

And this one;


I don't think people just shifted their miners. Some people are manipulating the network I think...

In what way do you think network is being manipulated?  I think network is so big manipulating it would take a big player.  You could rent miners to shift hash, but it would be expensive long term.

I think biggest factor is price of BTC.  We should see a lot of old gear come offline eventually, such as A1's.

One thing everyone needs to remember is that luck can play a factor in mining.  Should a pool with 160-200 THS get 2 block's in a day? No....  but with luck it is not impossible.

Well we miners actually can manipulate the market without realizing it.
 1)hardly any gear is being sold
 2) as a reaction to price or diff miners with a full understanding of gear will upclock and downclock gear.

An example I am running 1750gh yesterday at f2pool  it was earning 0.0097 btc a th or 0.016975 btc a day

today with diff I jumped my gear to 1950gh  it is earning 0.0101 btc a th or  0.019695 btc a day.

I got a 16 percent rise in btc

 the increase in  electric power used  was  12 percent

the increase in hashpower  was   11 percent.

Normally spending more  electric power then hash power gained is dumb you lose money but the diff dropped enough to  make economic sense to do it.

So take 5000 people like me and  we all will cause hash rate  to jump by  1ph.

  next  adjustment we see diff was too high we all downclock by 1ph.  So little miners as a group are shifting  hashrate by 1 or 2 or 3 ph say 1%

that is the seesaw  that is happening.  of course bigger miners will only do this if it makes money sense but for a little guy this is easy peasy.

[Jamphone]

I don't think people just shifted their miners. Some people are manipulating the network I think...

No one's manipulating the market, that's called variance. You'll see it every few days. In a small sample size you'll see it a ton. See the chart below. Those swings are all totally normal.

[philipma1957]

I don't think people just shifted their miners. Some people are manipulating the network I think...

No one's manipulating the market, that's called variance. You'll see it every few days. In a small sample size you'll see it a ton. See the chart below. Those swings are all totally normal.

variance is also a part of it  but not all of it.  Right now nicehash pays 0.0165 for your gear

So a lot of players will drift off btc

 4.3ph   have shifted from btc to whatever
see below that is real time and it is a manipulation of btc diff.  make a shit coin get people to try to make money on it and lower btc diff in the meantime.

We have gaw-zen- JOSH-paycoin to thank for this happening

[notlist3d]

I don't think people just shifted their miners. Some people are manipulating the network I think...

No one's manipulating the market, that's called variance. You'll see it every few days. In a small sample size you'll see it a ton. See the chart below. Those swings are all totally normal.

variance is also a part of it  but not all of it.  Right now nicehash pays 0.0165 for your gear

So a lot of players will drift off btc

 4.3ph   have shifted from btc to whatever
see below that is real time and it is a manipulation of btc diff.  make a shit coin get people to try to make money on it and lower btc diff in the meantime.

We have gaw-zen- JOSH-paycoin to thank for this happening

What is the coin that is being mined? Is it really Josh with I thought paycoin was done being mined.  I'm surprised people would fall for it again.

[Jamphone]

I don't think home miners have any real impact on the hashrate anymore, there are just so few of them relatively speaking. 4.3ph (which switched to some shiny new coin) is roughly 1.29% of the total network, where as the complaint up above is about much wilder swings in hashrate. The swing OP is pointing to is an extremely small sample size which shows nothing. Finding 6 blocks in 16 minutes is not a rare occurrence, albeit it isn't common either, but in and of itself no conclusion can be drawn. The graph I posted was to show small sample sizes, as in the bright green line, will produce wild swings but don't have enough information to indicate anything. The price of bitcoin *might* be manipulated, but the difficulty is dictated by the free market.

People who can afford to mine profitably will mine, that's all there is to it. A small portion may go mine something else, and *maybe* a low single digit percent of mining power is either switched off or under clocked, but the 5% up or down you see every two weeks is large data centres being filled up, emptied, rotating their stock and occasionally burning to the ground, not miners switching pools or turning on and off. The big guys mine 24/7 and there is no shutting off. There is simply too much money to be made and too much to be lost by being idled or gambling on alt coins. People can't afford to pay rent on a warehouse that's fill with turned off miners. And if they own the warehouse, they're kicking themselves wishing they'd done something more profitable with the money.

The graphs at bitcoin.sipa.be look really flat, especially by bitcoin standards. I'd say this suggests economics (ie. how much you make vs your costs) is dictating most mining. With the shitty price (and given the investment a lot of people made it is an awful price) very few miners are adding power and some miners simply can't pay the bills at a certain point, let alone justify expansion. There are a lot of miners paying 12 cents/kw or more to mine, to make only 2 or 3 cents from the same kwh after paying that electricity. Where 95% of the network is conducted on an industrial scale, very large bills are due monthly. There are a lot of facilities who can't break even below the current $70/TH/month, which is $105 made per KW of use at 0.66W/GH. (Although, obviously most hosts are above water since we're still at 96% of the hashrate we were at two weeks ago.) For older gear, which still makes up a lot of the network, 1W/GH yields only $70/KW used. That's below a lot of hosting prices. We're scraping those break even points, and that puts pressure on difficulty. More efficient machines means a non stop rise in difficulty over time, but that rise is becoming extremely slow.

I think the bigger story is the burn out rate versus replacement rate, both for miners and hosting. Right now, we're facing a significant drop off in old machines starting to die and several hosts shutting down. Half the network is at least 7 month old equipment which is going to start seeing failures in machines. It is a far different market than late 2013 and early 2014. At this price, low single digit growth per month is all you can expect, including the current pace of efficiency gains. However, this means the market is in a position where it will be much slower to react to any significant price rise. (Just like oil, natural gas and minerals, low prices mean tighter supply.) If the price spikes to $500, there will be an acute shortage of miners and hosting for months. Even at $500, doubling the hashrate would take 6 months or more.

[philipma1957]

I don't think home miners have any real impact on the hashrate anymore, there are just so few of them relatively speaking. 4.3ph (which switched to some shiny new coin) is roughly 1.29% of the total network, where as the complaint up above is about much wilder swings in hashrate. The swing OP is pointing to is an extremely small sample size which shows nothing. Finding 6 blocks in 16 minutes is not a rare occurrence, albeit it isn't common either, but in and of itself no conclusion can be drawn. The graph I posted was to show small sample sizes, as in the bright green line, will produce wild swings but don't have enough information to indicate anything. The price of bitcoin *might* be manipulated, but the difficulty is dictated by the free market.

People who can afford to mine profitably will mine, that's all there is to it. A small portion may go mine something else, and *maybe* a low single digit percent of mining power is either switched off or under clocked, but the 5% up or down you see every two weeks is large data centres being filled up, emptied, rotating their stock and occasionally burning to the ground, not miners switching pools or turning on and off. The big guys mine 24/7 and there is no shutting off. There is simply too much money to be made and too much to be lost by being idled or gambling on alt coins. People can't afford to pay rent on a warehouse that's fill with turned off miners. And if they own the warehouse, they're kicking themselves wishing they'd done something more profitable with the money.

The graphs at bitcoin.sipa.be look really flat, especially by bitcoin standards. I'd say this suggests economics (ie. how much you make vs your costs) is dictating most mining. With the shitty price (and given the investment a lot of people made it is an awful price) very few miners are adding power and some miners simply can't pay the bills at a certain point, let alone justify expansion. There are a lot of miners paying 12 cents/kw or more to mine, to make only 2 or 3 cents from the same kwh after paying that electricity. Where 95% of the network is conducted on an industrial scale, very large bills are due monthly. There are a lot of facilities who can't break even below the current $70/TH/month, which is $105 made per KW of use at 0.66W/GH. (Although, obviously most hosts are above water since we're still at 96% of the hashrate we were at two weeks ago.) For older gear, which still makes up a lot of the network, 1W/GH yields only $70/KW used. That's below a lot of hosting prices. We're scraping those break even points, and that puts pressure on difficulty. More efficient machines means a non stop rise in difficulty over time, but that rise is becoming extremely slow.

I think the bigger story is the burn out rate versus replacement rate, both for miners and hosting. Right now, we're facing a significant drop off in old machines starting to die and several hosts shutting down. Half the network is at least 7 month old equipment which is going to start seeing failures in machines. It is a far different market than late 2013 and early 2014. At this price, low single digit growth per month is all you can expect, including the current pace of efficiency gains. However, this means the market is in a position where it will be much slower to react to any significant price rise. (Just like oil, natural gas and minerals, low prices mean tighter supply.) If the price spikes to $500, there will be an acute shortage of miners and hosting for months. Even at $500, doubling the hashrate would take 6 months or more.

  Trends based on 16 minutes while interesting do not mean much.  Today antpool made a 4 second block  very rare but bound to happen.  A lot of people maybe the op don't understand game theory .  A single  4 second block is a rare thing even if you have 17% of all the networks hash. (antpool has about that much)  but   ten 4 second blocks in  a row  by antpool would be next to impossible.