Neighbourhood Pool Watch

[Maged]

You can change your vote.

[organofcorti]

Should I add it, Goat?

[organofcorti]

organofcorti, your problem is that you're assuming that the actual expected round length is supposed to be 1.0281 D. Instead, assume that it's 1.0 D. What is the probability that the measured round lengths would average to 1.0281 D by chance?

You'd like to assume the population mean to be 1xD and estimate the probability of the round lengths averaging to 1.0281? Using a similar technique to that described earlier (using code similar to this) we get a probability of 0.8801 rounds being less than 1.0281, giving a probability of rounds being 1.0281 or longer at 1-0.8801=0.1199. This is even worse than the estimate I provided earlier.

My statistics are a little rusty, but isn't that result not statistically significant?

i don't think we're testing a hypothesis here. it's just a probability.

yes, it's just based on the cdf.

...unless organofcorti wants to do a series of real-time test with a similar sized prop pool.

Can't do that either. If we assume the population mean is 1.0*D, we have to assume the distribution is similar to the Bitclockers.com distribution. Can't compare a geometrically distributed round with a bitclockers.com round - they aren't similar.

Sorry guys, I was wrong in both cases. I forgot that using the CLT a) it doesn't matter what distributions the means are from and b you can assume normality so you could consider it a non-significant p-value. It still stands as a probability though, and 0.1316 is still low.

[Gabi]

"trusting" p2pool is misleading. P2pool do not require trust, because it CANNOT scam you.

[organofcorti]

Neighbourhood Pool Watch 2.1 Deepbit is out (and yes I've moved the 'Neighbourhood Pool Watch' blog to Blogger).

From the post:

6. Conclusions

• Comparisons of the empirical and expected statistical parameters for Deepbit's round lengths  show little difference.
• Quantile and CDF comparisons likewise show expected results, and the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test indicates that the null hypothesis cannot be rejected.
• Deepbit.net's current mean round length is slightly less than expected, but not improbably so.
• A fulltime proportional miner can be quite confident that they will earn at least as much as a PPS miner within 11 days (at the current pool hashrate).

You can comment at the blog if you're logged in to gmail, or here if you don't have a gmail account (whaaa....?)

Edit: on second thoughts, I've left the commenting open to anyone - you won't have to log in.

[ZPK]

add pool.itzod.ru

[organofcorti]

add pool.itzod.ru

If you mean "please add pool.itzod.ru to the poll options", well maybe next time. I'm closing the poll soon, and it wouldn't be fair to the pool. I'll do another poll at some point.

[kano]

"trusting" p2pool is misleading. P2pool do not require trust, because it CANNOT scam you.

Then again
Did you realise that by default you give 0.5% of your earnings to forrestv?
You must change that if you wish it to be a different value

[Clipse]

"trusting" p2pool is misleading. P2pool do not require trust, because it CANNOT scam you.

Then again
Did you realise that by default you give 0.5% of your earnings to forrestv?
You must change that if you wish it to be a different value

Are you suggesting a voluntary donation that is switched on by default is a scam?

If so, at least provide me with instructions on disabling the fee on the three largest mining pools. 

Oh and, RTFM!

Auto enabling a fee and calling it a voluntary donation isnt the same thing.

Voluntary suggests you informed a user and they then took steps to provide a donation, I wont be surprised if a bunch of p2pool users didnt even know about this 0.5% fee.

[martychubbs]

2.1 was more good reading! Thanks, very well done.

[organofcorti]

2.1 was more good reading! Thanks, very well done.

You're welcome, Marty. Next up looks at how strategic miners affect the payouts of fulltime miners on the prop payout side.

[kano]

2.1 was more good reading! Thanks, very well done.

You're welcome, Marty. Next up looks at how strategic miners affect the payouts of fulltime miners on the prop payout side.

Hmm I've found 3 blocks on DeepBit prop and been paid about 30BTC ... ... 500% luck
(Yes that statement is true by the way)

[organofcorti]

2.1 was more good reading! Thanks, very well done.

You're welcome, Marty. Next up looks at how strategic miners affect the payouts of fulltime miners on the prop payout side.

Hmm I've found 3 blocks on DeepBit prop and been paid about 30BTC ... ... 500% luck
(Yes that statement is true by the way)

I solved one block ever and mined 110 btc. Thats 220% over what I would have gotten solo. You would have gotten 150btc mining solo, so I'd call that bad luck. Still, it averages out for us all.

[kano]

2.1 was more good reading! Thanks, very well done.

You're welcome, Marty. Next up looks at how strategic miners affect the payouts of fulltime miners on the prop payout side.

Hmm I've found 3 blocks on DeepBit prop and been paid about 30BTC ... ... 500% luck
(Yes that statement is true by the way)

I solved block ever and mined 110 btc. Thats 220% over what I would have gotten solo. You would have gotten 150btc mining solo, so I'd call that bad luck. Still, it averages out for us all.

My comment was actually in reply to your one I quoted in case you didn't realise

[organofcorti]

Neighbourhood Pool Watch 2.2 is out now. This post shows how much strategic miners add to Deepbit.net's overall hashrate, and how much full time proportional payout miners lose in the process.

The post was inspired by P4man's initial work on the subject here.

5. Conclusions

• Strategic miners are successfully adding 450 Ghps to Deepbit.net's overall hashrate.
• Due to the presence of strategic miners, full time miners can expect to earn only 94% of expected round earnings,not 97% (including fee).
• This loss in income means that it actually takes over 30 days (at current pool hashrate) for fulltime proportional miners to be confident of earning the same as or more than PPS miners, rather than 11 days without strategic miners present.

organofcorti's Second Rule of Pooled Bitcoin Mining: Avoid proportional payouts unless you're mining strategically.

[organofcorti]

2.1 was more good reading! Thanks, very well done.

You're welcome, Marty. Next up looks at how strategic miners affect the payouts of fulltime miners on the prop payout side.

Hmm I've found 3 blocks on DeepBit prop and been paid about 30BTC ... ... 500% luck
(Yes that statement is true by the way)

I solved block ever and mined 110 btc. Thats 220% over what I would have gotten solo. You would have gotten 150btc mining solo, so I'd call that bad luck. Still, it averages out for us all.

My comment was actually in reply to your one I quoted in case you didn't realise

You can be a cryptic bugger, Kano

[P4man]

Interesting read Organ.
I do wonder if perhaps you are not misinterpreting the data; when a round starts, you get fresh work. Even assuming zero delay from the pool, and zero network latency, only the fastest miners are going to be able to submit shares within seconds. Slower miners may take up to a minute or more before they submit their first share.

I wonder if that by itself couldnt cause both the drop at the beginning of the round, and the slow spike afterwards. After all, deepbit rounds are very short, and I wouldnt be surprised there a lot of slow and clueless miners on there.

As for the poll:

Bitclockers.com    - 2 (0.6%)

Will the one person besides the pool admin who voted for bitclockers please stand up?

[organofcorti]

Interesting read Organ.
I do wonder if perhaps you are not misinterpreting the data; when a round starts, you get fresh work. Even assuming zero delay from the pool, and zero network latency, only the fastest miners are going to be able to submit shares within seconds. Slower miners may take up to a minute or more before they submit their first share.

I wonder if that by itself couldnt cause both the drop at the beginning of the round, and the slow spike afterwards. After all, deepbit rounds are very short, and I wouldnt be surprised there a lot of slow and clueless miners on there.

No, I can see how you'd think that, but a group of poisson distributed variables with different means is still a poisson distributed variable with a new mean of arrivals per unit time that is the sum of the of the constituent mean arrivals per unit time.

Think of it this way. 10 miners with 1 Ghps will submit about 2.3 shares per second on average. So will one miner with 10Ghps.

The only thing I can put the slow hashrate increase from below normal is variable time to receive a long poll notice. Until such notice is received, any shares that are sent will be stale. Then there's the time taken for the trip back, which may not be the same as the trip there, due to variable servers on the way.

A log-normal distribution is a good fit for a combination of normally distributed variables that have a multiplicative effect on each other, so I chose it as a starting point for the model. It turned out to model that response pretty well. It's only the mean of ~ 0.7 seconds and deviation of ~1.7 seconds that I can't interpret.

[organofcorti]

Poll voting is locked. Results published shortly.

[organofcorti]

Here are the results for the "Which pools do you trust?" poll.



Below is a bubble plot showing votes on the y axis and bubble size showing hashrate.



It seems that small pools vary significantly from the minimum to the maximum of the vote, and the larger pool are in the mid range. To try to account for hashrate, I divided all votes by the log of the hashrate to get a 'trust index'. I used log(hashrate) to try to account for the fact that novice miners that might not know much about trust tend to gravitate to larger pools first.



p2Pool is the clear winner, followed by EMC and Ozcoin. Well done to all in the top three pools - you've gained significantly more trust in the community than others.

Proviso: although data is accurate, it probably is not very reliable. It's self selecting: mostly english speakers and only those concerned about trust in pools. Further, sample size is small and voters could vote more than once which skew results further.