Weekly pool and network statistics

[organofcorti]

Part of unknown is definitely the 100TH project which left BTC Guild to start solo mining in the last week.  They're not on your list.  They told me they were going to be tagging coinbases, but apparently something broke because I can't find any.

Thanks eleuthria. They only just started to sign the coinbase at block 261530, and then proceeded to solve another 15 in 186000 seconds, which puts them at about 55Thps.

Interestingly, 186000 is the number of miles light travels in a second.

I do so enjoy pointless asides.

actually, it is 186285 miles per second in a vacuum<sp>.

I was quoting the number of miles light travels in a um not quite vacuum.

[os2sam]

Part of unknown is definitely the 100TH project which left BTC Guild to start solo mining in the last week.  They're not on your list.  They told me they were going to be tagging coinbases, but apparently something broke because I can't find any.

Thanks eleuthria. They only just started to sign the coinbase at block 261530, and then proceeded to solve another 15 in 186000 seconds, which puts them at about 55Thps.

Interestingly, 186000 is the number of miles light travels in a second.

I do so enjoy pointless asides.

actually, it is 186285 miles per second in a vacuum<sp>.

I was quoting the number of miles light travels in a um not quite vacuum.

Is the speed of light really influenced by matter it passes through, or by?  I have never heard that.

[organofcorti]

Part of unknown is definitely the 100TH project which left BTC Guild to start solo mining in the last week.  They're not on your list.  They told me they were going to be tagging coinbases, but apparently something broke because I can't find any.

Thanks eleuthria. They only just started to sign the coinbase at block 261530, and then proceeded to solve another 15 in 186000 seconds, which puts them at about 55Thps.

Interestingly, 186000 is the number of miles light travels in a second.

I do so enjoy pointless asides.

actually, it is 186285 miles per second in a vacuum<sp>.

I was quoting the number of miles light travels in a um not quite vacuum.

Is the speed of light really influenced by matter it passes through, or by?  I have never heard that.

Sort of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_light

[organofcorti]

13th October 2013 weekly pool and network statistics


Welcome, miners.

Changelog:
Added "For Pierce and Paul" and "Alydian5335" to the weekly stats.
Usual pools missing from results:
Nil
Errors:
Nil
Pools with coinbase signature:
Note - now treating "For Pierce and Paul" as a hashing entity/pool rather than just a message.

ASICMiner: "Mined By ASICMiner"
Alydian5335: "Alydian5335"
Bitparking: "bitparking"
BitMinter:  "BitMinter"
BTCGuild :  "Mined by BTC Guild", "BTC Guild DE", "BTC Guild 2", "BTC Guild US2", plus a new signature, "BTC Guild GW"
CoinLab: "CoinLab"
Discus Fish: "七彩神仙鱼" and "Made in China"
EclipseMC: "EMC"
Eligius: "Eligius"
50BTC.com: "Hi from 50BTC.com
GHash.IO: "ghash.io"
HHTT: "HHTT"
Megabigpower "megabigpower.com"
175btc.com": "Mined By 175btc.com"
Ozcoin: "ozcoin"
Pierce and Paul: "For Pierce and Paul"
Triplemining: "Triplemining.com"
Slush's pool: "slush"


Recent coinbase messages:
258692 "To my honey, by bitfish."
259575 259622 259625  "EMC: Organofcorti lives!"

Pool hopping:
Nil.

1. As well as the canonical message sender, Discus Fish is now also for Pierce and Paul.
I've now added the anonymous P&P as a pool, at about 85Thps. Interestingly, Discus Fish have also appended some of their blocks with the same message - however, payments go to different addresses.

2. DDOS' this week
More DDOS, BTCGuild and Eclipse being affected, Eclipse significantly so (see figures 3 and 4). If there are significant advances in anti-DDOS technology, I wouldn't be surprised to see it develop as a direct result of the ridiculous number of DDOS attacks on mining pools.

3. Dirty pictures
Also on figure 4 is a very strange, almost tallywhacker-like extrusion, consisting of a 100 Thps increase and decrease in BTCGuild's hashrate. I haven't seen anyone take credit yet, but that entity is surely doing to smaller miners exactly what a tallywhacker is meant to do.

Please note that Organofcorti lives!

As usual, please post comments if there's anything you don't understand, with which you disagree, or just think is wrong.
You can view this weeks charts at http://organofcorti.blogspot.com/2013/10/october-13th-2013-weekly-pool-and.html

You can view all previous charts and other posts and fun things at http://organofcorti.blogspot.com and follow me on Twitter @oocBlog for notification of new posts as soon as I publish.

[organofcorti]

20th October 2013 weekly pool and network statistics


Welcome, miners.

Changelog:
Pools that don't find a block or for which I can't get data are not included in the weekly statistics and charts.
Usual pools missing from results:
GHash.IO - can access the API at them moment.
Errors:
Nil
Pools with coinbase signature:
ASICMiner: "Mined By ASICMiner"
Alydian5335: "Alydian5335"
Bitparking: "bitparking"
BitMinter:  "BitMinter"
BTCGuild :  "Mined by BTC Guild", "BTC Guild DE", "BTC Guild 2", "BTC Guild US2", plus a new signature, "BTC Guild GW"
CoinLab: "CoinLab"
Discus Fish: "七彩神仙鱼" and "Made in China"
EclipseMC: "EMC"
Eligius: "Eligius"
50BTC.com: "Hi from 50BTC.com" and  "50BTC.com"
GHash.IO: "ghash.io" (not current)
HHTT: "HHTT"
Megabigpower "megabigpower.com"
175btc.com": "Mined By 175btc.com"
Ozcoin: "ozcoin"
Pierce and Paul: "For Pierce and Paul"
Triplemining: "Triplemining.com"
Slush's pool: "slush"
Recent coinbase messages:
258692 "To my honey, by bitfish."
259575 259622 259625  "EMC: Organofcorti lives!"
263952 "btcpoolman"

Pool hopping:
Nil.

1. Network solves 1523 blocks this week: 9th highest block solve rate ever.
With the addition of KNC miners starting to arrive over the last two weeks, the hashrate has increased significantly, difficulty increased by almost 50%. Even so this week is only the 9th highest number of blocks solved in a single week - more than twice that many were solved in the heady days just after the opening of MTGOX.


Top weekly block solves in the past:


1 2010-07-18 3403
2 2011-05-29 1690
3 2011-05-22 1655
4 2011-02-27 1600
5 2010-11-14 1562
6 2011-06-19 1539
7 2010-08-15 1534
8 2010-10-31 1530



2. Unknown this week
The very large percentage of unknown this week is mostly due to GHash.io. I was unable to access the pools' API this week, and they're not signing the coinbase of solved blocks, so my backups didn't work either. Hopefully it will all be sort out by next week.

3. Dirty pictures - again
(see figure 4) Poor BTCGuild is again the victim of user 215613, whoever it is. It seems that they just want to make BTCGuild's hashrate look like a rude picture rather than contribute to the pool full-time. Or am I the only one seeing this? Maybe it says more about me than them.

4. Eligius is up
Since July Eligius has been a solidly performing middle ranked pool. This week however their hashrate increased significantly, and with the absence of GHash.IO are in second place behind BTCGuild.

5. Eclipse has ups and downs
(see figure 4) Check out the bouncing hashrate at Eclipse this week - it's up and down like a bride's nightie. Someone testing there? Maybe user 215613? Odd though, same thing happend last week too.

6. 50BTC is down
Once they were heirs to BTCGuild's crown - but since July they just haven't been able to keep up with the network's increase in hashrate. They are offering ASICs for sale so I hope this helps increase their hashrate.

As usual, please post comments if there's anything you don't understand, with which you disagree, or just think is wrong.
You can view this weeks charts at http://organofcorti.blogspot.com/2013/10/october-20th-2013-weekly-pool-and.html

You can view all previous charts at http://organofcorti.blogspot.com.au/search?q=weeklypoolstatistics and other posts and fun things at http://organofcorti.blogspot.com. Follow me on Twitter @oocBlog for notification of new posts as soon as I publish.

[eleuthria]

The very large percentage of unknown this week is mostly due to GHash.io. I was unable to access the pools' API this week, and they're not signing the coinbase of solved blocks, so my backups didn't work either. Hopefully it will all be sort out by next week.

Don't all of GHash.IO's blocks pay out to 1CjPR7Z5ZSyWk6WtXvSFgkptmpoi4UM9BC ?  Seems like a decent alternative to checking the coinbase.  I'm also curious if anybody knows if KNC's mining pool is simply a proxy to another pool, part of ghash.io, or separate and has some way to identify their blocks if so.

[organofcorti]

The very large percentage of unknown this week is mostly due to GHash.io. I was unable to access the pools' API this week, and they're not signing the coinbase of solved blocks, so my backups didn't work either. Hopefully it will all be sort out by next week.

Don't all of GHash.IO's blocks pay out to 1CjPR7Z5ZSyWk6WtXvSFgkptmpoi4UM9BC ?  Seems like a decent alternative to checking the coinbase.  I'm also curious if anybody knows if KNC's mining pool is simply a proxy to another pool, part of ghash.io, or separate and has some way to identify their blocks if so.

I haven't gotten around to adding that query yet - but it would be a really useful feature.

[organofcorti]

27th October 2013 weekly pool and network statistics


Welcome, miners.

Changelog:
Polmine added to the weekly statistics. A big thank you to Polmine for creating a special API for yours truly, and another big thank you to bitcointalk forum member pajak666 for making the request, and then making sure I didn't forget to add it to the weekly stats.
Updated some of the charts to Thps. Yet to update the table, poolhopping chart and  user hashrate density chart.
GHash.IO is back in the charts. Thanks for getting the glitch sorted for me, Alex. The stats just weren't the same without GHash.IO.
Usual pools missing from results:
None
Errors:
Nil
Pools with coinbase signature:
ASICMiner: "Mined By ASICMiner"
Alydian5335: "Alydian5335"
Bitparking: "bitparking"
BitMinter:  "BitMinter"
BTCGuild :  "Mined by BTC Guild", "BTC Guild DE", "BTC Guild 2", "BTC Guild US2", plus a new signature, "BTC Guild GW"
CoinLab: "CoinLab"
Discus Fish: "七彩神仙鱼" and "Made in China"
EclipseMC: "EMC"
Eligius: "Eligius"
50BTC.com: "Hi from 50BTC.com" and  "50BTC.com"
GHash.IO: "ghash.io" (not current)
HHTT: "HHTT"
Megabigpower "megabigpower.com"
175btc.com": "Mined By 175btc.com"
Ozcoin: "ozcoin"
Pierce and Paul: "For Pierce and Paul"
Triplemining: "Triplemining.com"
Slush's pool: "slush"
Recent coinbase messages:
258692 "To my honey, by bitfish."
259575 259622 259625  "EMC: Organofcorti lives!"
263952 "btcpoolman"

Pool hopping:
Nil.

1. Network solves 1508 blocks this week.
Another extreme block solve rate, leading to another ~ 50% increase in difficulty. I think most miners are going to have trouble making enough to pay for electricity soon. On the upside, there will be very few CPU and GPU miners left, and once most pools adopt a minimum share submission difficulty, there will be fewer still.

2. The large get larger.
It seems that miners want the reduction in variance that a large pool brings - the top five pools all saw an increase in their share of the network, where as the lower five saw a reduction in their share of the network. I hazard a guess many of these are 50BTC refugees (see section 5, below) used to the low variance a large pool brings, and they probably feel safer at a large well established pool.

I would like to point out here that spreading your hashrate among various pools not only helps keep the network less centralised, but also reduces your variance significantly over using just one pool. Send a few shares to a smaller pool and help the network.

3. Eligius takes 2nd.
Eligius continues it's meteoric rise in hashrate. Anyone know why? It's a recent change and extreme. Good luck to wizkid!

4. Eclipse and Polmine have similar ups and downs.
(see figure 4) Eclipses hashrate continues to bounce, and Polmine's is quite similar. I've double checked my scripts, so I have no idea why this would be. Big hashrates being added and removed every second block? Errors in the data? I have no idea. But it is very unusual.

5. 50BTC is really down.
The news that 50BTC.com was hacked and many coins stolen hit the community hard. This was quite a large pool (although no longer) and many miners have been affected. Although they seem to be attempting to work their way through the mess, 50BTC.com spokespeople have been slow to reassure their English speaking miners. Many have been upset that they haven't been able to withdraw BTC, and many have changed pools. FWIW, I think 50.BTC have planned to be here for the long haul -  but after this last hack they may not be able to recover.

Good luck 50.BTC - we hope you can recover and prosper.


As usual, please post comments if there's anything you don't understand, with which you disagree, or just think is wrong.
You can view this weeks charts at http://organofcorti.blogspot.com/2013/10/october-20th-2013-weekly-pool-and.html

You can view all previous charts at http://organofcorti.blogspot.com.au/search?q=weeklypoolstatistics and other posts and fun things at http://organofcorti.blogspot.com. Follow me on Twitter @oocBlog for notification of new posts as soon as I publish.

[organofcorti]

3rd November 2013 weekly pool and network statistics


Other weekly pool and network statistics posts

Welcome, miners.

Changelog:
Updated the table and all charts but the user hashrate density chart to Thps. User hashrates are still best measured in Ghps.
"Unknown" has been in the pie chart for a while; now I've also added it to the table, along with confidence intervals for the hashrate.
Pie chart has been changed to be prettier (and hopefully easier to read).
Pool hopping chart for Deepbit has been changed to include the last ~128 days. I'll reduce this if Deepbit's share of the network rises again.

Usual pools missing from results:
50BTC - no blocks solved this week.

Errors:
Nil

Pools with coinbase signature:
ASICMiner: "Mined By ASICMiner"
Alydian5335: "Alydian5335"
Bitparking: "bitparking"
BitMinter:  "BitMinter"
BTCGuild :  "Mined by BTC Guild", "BTC Guild DE", "BTC Guild 2", "BTC Guild US2", plus a new signature, "BTC Guild GW"
CoinLab: "CoinLab"
Discus Fish: "七彩神仙鱼" and "Made in China"
EclipseMC: "EMC"
Eligius: "Eligius"
50BTC.com: "Hi from 50BTC.com" and  "50BTC.com"
GHash.IO: "ghash.io" (not current)
HHTT: "HHTT"
Megabigpower "megabigpower.com"
175btc.com": "Mined By 175btc.com"
Ozcoin: "ozcoin"
Pierce and Paul: "For Pierce and Paul"
Triplemining: "Triplemining.com"
Slush's pool: "slush"
Recent coinbase messages:
258692 "To my honey, by bitfish."
259575 259622 259625  "EMC: Organofcorti lives!"
263952 "btcpoolman"

Pool hopping:
Nil.

1. Network drops back to solving 1330 blocks during the past week.
Since February this year, (the start of the ASIC induced network hashrate increase ) ~ 1200 blocks have been solved per week, (8.4 minutes per block). For the last couple of weeks as KNC miners were delivered, the network was solving ~ 1500 blocks per week (6.72 minutes per block). Now, the network has returned to its previous background acceleration - until the next batch of ASICs ship.

2. 50BTC at 4Ghps.
Almost no one is mining at 50BTC - after the last announcement, I guess they're waiting to see what happens next.

3. Eclipse and Polmine: Ups and downs, again.
(see figure 4) I've noticed Eclipse's bouncing hashrates for a while now. It's not beyond reason that the 40Thps spikes this week could be due to intermittently added hashrates. However, the hashrate changes per block that Polmine has been experiencing must be due to data error:
        

Code:

Date        Thps
1 2013-10-29   2.9978219
2 2013-10-30   3.0793512
3 2013-10-31 147.9324923
4 2013-11-02   0.2168786
5 2013-11-02 101.8922103

I haven't been able to figure out what the problem might be just yet.

5. Proofread for me.
Most of my posts are completed around 2am, and when it's late my proofreading abilities are somewhat poor. Plus my spacebar seems to be sticking and I don't always notice it. So if you find a typo or spelling error in my blog posts, email me the error or errors (highlighted in red) and if you're the first to email them, I'll pay you per error:
 
As usual, please post comments if there's anything you don't understand, with which you disagree, or just think is wrong.
You can view this weeks charts at http://organofcorti.blogspot.com.au/2013/11/november-3rd-2013-weekly-pool-and.html

You can view all previous charts at http://organofcorti.blogspot.com.au/search?q=weeklypoolstatistics and other posts and fun things at http://organofcorti.blogspot.com. Follow me on Twitter @oocBlog for notification of new posts as soon as I publish.

[organofcorti]

10th November 2013 weekly pool and network statistics


Other weekly pool and network statistics posts

Welcome, miners.


Changelog:

    Added GIVE-ME-COINS.com.
    A reader reported that the confidence intervals for the network hashrate in figure 2 were very hard to see. I have removed the gray background and reduced the line width to make the confidence interval a bit clearer.
    The gray background has also been removed from the pie chart - it also has some transparency so I think a white background will allow better contrast.

Usual pools missing from results:

    50BTC and Deepbit - no blocks solved this week.

Errors:

    Nil

Pools with coinbase signature:

    ASICMiner: "Mined By ASICMiner"
    Alydian5335: "Alydian5335"
    Bitparking: "bitparking"
    BitMinter:  "BitMinter"
    BTCGuild :  "Mined by BTC Guild", "BTC Guild DE", "BTC Guild 2", "BTC Guild US2", plus a new signature, "BTC Guild GW"
    CoinLab: "CoinLab"
    Discus Fish: "七彩神仙鱼" and "Made in China"
    EclipseMC: "EMC"
    Eligius: "Eligius"
    50BTC.com: "Hi from 50BTC.com" and  "50BTC.com"
    GHash.IO: "ghash.io" (not current)
    GIVE-ME-COINS.com: "Mined at GIVE-ME-COINS.com"
    HHTT: "HHTT"
    Megabigpower "megabigpower.com"
    175btc.com": "Mined By 175btc.com"
    Ozcoin: "ozcoin"
    Pierce and Paul: "For Pierce and Paul"
    Triplemining: "Triplemining.com"
    Slush's pool: "slush"

Recent coinbase messages:

    258692 "To my honey, by bitfish."
    259575 259622 259625  "EMC: Organofcorti lives!"
    263952 "btcpoolman"

Pool hopping:

    Nil.


 

1. Network drops back even further - 1150 blocks solved this week.

Perhaps it's the effect of KNC finishing shipping and the changes in difficulty that caused, but the number of blocks solved this week was 1150 - only 14% more than expected. Hopefully the next change in difficulty wont be as extreme as the last few.

2. Most big pools have bad luck this week.

In order of crappiness of luck (worst luck to best luck):

Code:

                Pool Mean shares/round/difficulty  CDF
1              Itzod           1.19                0.73
2        Giga's pool           1.12                0.75
3           GHash.IO           1.11                0.96
4              Slush           1.08                0.76
5           BTCGuild           1.05                0.82
6          Bitminter           1.04                0.65
7            Eligius           0.94                0.22
8         Bitparking           0.79                0.36
9             p2Pool           0.71                0.11
10           Polmine           0.69                0.24
11           Eclipse           0.68                0.04

This means is was probably a bad luck week for the network. However, it should be noted that the CDF for all pools were within a 95% confidence interval and so when averaged over the week none had unusually good or bad luck.

4. 50BTC still at 4Ghps.

Still no news, almost no-one mining, but lots of anger in the 50BTC thread on the bitcointalk.org forum.


5. Polmine: more bouncy hashrates.

(see figure 4) A commenter on last weeks' post named 'lenny' had this to say:

    Polmine's spikes in hashrate happening, because main server is running out of processing power. Right now, according to main pool operator - megavega, background thread is processing backlog of accepted shares during last couple of days, process has reached 60% so far. That's why hashrate right now seems to be higher than it's really is, and was reported lower than it really was in last couple of days.

This may be correct, however the "hashrate spikes" have been occurring since the start of the dataset - so while this may explain one of last weeks' spikes, it doesn't explain them all. Any other ideas?


Polmine's hashrate per round:

Code:

        Date   Thps
1 2013-11-04  14.36
2 2013-11-04   6.17
3 2013-11-05 178.77
4 2013-11-07  11.78
5 2013-11-09   5.23

6. Proofreading

Proofreading payments total so far: 0.105 btc.

Thanks to everyone who has submitted error reports so far! I appreciate all the help I can get. Note that with the recent increase in the exchange rate, the current payment per error has automatically dropped to 0.001 btc.
 
As usual, please post comments if there's anything you don't understand, with which you disagree, or just think is wrong.
You can view this weeks charts at http://organofcorti.blogspot.com.au/2013/11/november-10th-2013-weekly-pool-and.html

You can view all previous charts at http://organofcorti.blogspot.com.au/search?q=weeklypoolstatistics and other posts and fun things at http://organofcorti.blogspot.com. Follow me on Twitter @oocBlog for notification of new posts as soon as I publish.

[eleuthria]

Thanks again for your work.  I'm actually relieved that the BTC Guild CDF wasn't *that* bad.  That 24 hour period of bad luck was brutal, and felt like it was going to drag the whole week down to a 0.99-1.00 CDF.

[os2sam]

What does "CDF" stand for?

[RoadTrain]

What does "CDF" stand for?

Cumulative distribution function.

[os2sam]

What does "CDF" stand for?

Cumulative distribution function.

Aha, well I wish I could say that was helpful.

What is the theory of operation behind that term?

[RoadTrain]

What does "CDF" stand for?

Cumulative distribution function.

Aha, well I wish I could say that was helpful.

What is the theory of operation behind that term?

Did you read wikipedia?

In short, it reflects luck. The lower it is, the better the luck is.
CDF can tell you the probability of a block being found with a given number of shares.
50% value corresponds to expected value, i.e. neutral luck.

[os2sam]

What does "CDF" stand for?

Cumulative distribution function.

Aha, well I wish I could say that was helpful.

What is the theory of operation behind that term?

Did you read wikipedia?

In short, it reflects luck. The lower it is, the better the luck is.
CDF can tell you the probability of a block being found with a given number of shares.
50% value corresponds to expected value, i.e. neutral luck.

Nope I hadn't read wikipedia.  I thought that was a Bitcoin specific term.  But reading, well looking at, the wikipedia article doesn't look too helpful since I'm not a statistician.

Your explanation does help though.
Thanks,
Sam

[Sonny]

What does "CDF" stand for?

Cumulative distribution function.

Aha, well I wish I could say that was helpful.

What is the theory of operation behind that term?

Did you read wikipedia?

In short, it reflects luck. The lower it is, the better the luck is.
CDF can tell you the probability of a block being found with a given number of shares.
50% value corresponds to expected value, i.e. neutral luck.

50% is indeed the "median", rather than "mean" (expected value).

If my understand is correct, block finding is like a poisson process and number of blocks found should follow poisson distribution.
Of course, the rate parameter changes continuously as miners go on and off, and every 2016 blocks at difficulty adjustment.

[organofcorti]

What does "CDF" stand for?

Cumulative distribution function.

Aha, well I wish I could say that was helpful.

What is the theory of operation behind that term?

Did you read wikipedia?

In short, it reflects luck. The lower it is, the better the luck is.
CDF can tell you the probability of a block being found with a given number of shares.
50% value corresponds to expected value, i.e. neutral luck.

50% is indeed the "median", rather than "mean" (expected value).

If my understand is correct, block finding is like a poisson process and number of blocks found should follow poisson distribution.
Of course, the rate parameter changes continuously as miners go on and off, and every 2016 blocks at difficulty adjustment.

This is correct - the CDF measures the probability that a random variable will be larger or (in this case) smaller than a given random variable.

Here, the random variable is the average (d1 shares per round)/network difficulty for a given number of rounds, which is described by the Erlang distribution.

You'll notice for example that Itzod, with an average (d1 shares per round)/network difficulty of 1.19  had a CDF of 0.73, with 7 blocks solved. This means that 73% of the time a pool solves 7 blocks, the average  (d1 shares per round)/network difficulty  will be lower - and luck will be better.

OTOH   GHash.IO  had an average of  1.11 for 261 blocks soved, with a CDF of 0.96, so 96% of the time 261 blocks are solved, the average will be less than 1.11.

The more blocks solved, the "narrower" the CDF.

I've tried to explain it simply so I've left some things out. If it doesn't make sense, ask again and I'll try to make it a bit more clear.

[os2sam]

I've tried to explain it simply so I've left some things out. If it doesn't make sense, ask again and I'll try to make it a bit more clear.

Digesting.
Thanks all,
Sam

[os2sam]

I've tried to explain it simply so I've left some things out. If it doesn't make sense, ask again and I'll try to make it a bit more clear.

Digesting.
Thanks all,
Sam

So, looking at Eclipse, .68 for (d1 shares per round)/network difficulty, looks pretty good.  But the chance of getting that luck is only 4%?