Thanks for all your input, Its About Sharing, Puppet and Dabs. You've all given me some idea of interesting problems to work on. Sorry it's taken so long for me to get back to you.
I'm just looking for a difficult predictor to compliment what is already out there. It seems you are taking the hashing projections quite deep and so you probably will have one of the more accurate difficulty predictors. As far as timeline, it would be nice to have a 4 week projection. But what you are already doing with the range can allow you to take it out further (but perhaps that doesn't serve a real useful purpose so far out). That range (leeway with your blue shadows looking forward) is great.
The I can forecast four retargets (~ 6 weeks at the moment) ahead with reasonable accuracy, better than the 6 week average hashrate forecast anyway. I'll post here once I get a post up. I really do want to get the forecasts up weekly but finding the time is tricky.
Puppet's comment addresses a way around the posting problem:
Organ, may I suggest an analysis that I personally would find more interesting?
Not sure how to put it, but giving us an idea of how accurate live updating difficulty predictions and hashrate estimates are.
For instance, right now, when I visit
http://dot-bit.org/tools/nextDifficulty.phpI see a projection of 235M, but its based on ~600 blocks. What is the spread on that ?
Or put another way, I would like to see something similar as dot bit, but guessing *current* network hashrate and next difficulty adjustment with 50 and 95% confidence intervals.
This would have to be live updating to be really interesting tough.
Live updating would be fantastic. I have a domain, and I could easily write something automated to regenerate charts at a two hour lag (to allow for orphaned blocks) but I have two problems:
* I have absolutely no experience in running or coding a site or a server
* Not many hosts are ok with their server running bitcoind - I remember one guy who was kicked off his host for exactly that (I think they thought he was mining or something)
So I could do (and already do for myself) exactly what you're suggesting but I have no idea how to do it or even how to go about learning to do it, or if I have enough time to learn to do it. I'd welcome any hints or suggestions.
ooc, can you translate your next forecast into bitcoin mining difficulty numbers? Like, 200 million, 300 million, 500 million, 1 billion, ... and when we can expect this?
Worst case scenario when all the new hardware comes online and hashing (this company said 2000 TH by January 2014, that company said 1000 TH, etc.)
I actually do a separate model for Difficulty - it's more accurate than estimating based on an estimated hashrate, and also forecasts the date of the difficulty change too.
The model can't do a worst case scenario though, and forecasting that far ahead would be too inaccurate by any measure of use.
Death and Taxes' thread is what you're after. A visualisation of the data in that thread is probably a good idea and I can do that - but it won't be a modelled forecast with confidence intervals and so forth.
I promise I'll get around to posting forecasts weekly (weekly average hashrate, daily average hashrate and difficulty) but I'm really focussed on forecasting BTC prices. I didn't think it could be done with any degree of usefulness, but as I learn and experiment more I'm finding out I was wrong. It's really exciting (if you're in to that sort of thing).
