April 6th 2014 Weekly Hashrate Contributor and Network StatisticsOther Weekly Hashrate Contributor and Network Statistics postsWelcome, miners.
Changelog:
IceDrill added.
Errors:
Eligius missing from Figure 7 (data not available).
Bitparking has changed names to mmpool.com. I haven't changed over the the historical data yet, and this week's data was unavailable when the data was being collected.
Notifications:
Nil.
0. Discus Fish and KNCMiner overtake BTCGuild and Eligius.
This really is very big new. Firstly, there is not much transparency when it comes to the new top three entities.
GHash.IO is the most transparent of the three, providing share per round data that is not available for Discus Fish (aka F2Pool) or KNCMiner. However we don't know how much of GHash.IO is owned by the pool, how much is hosted by the pool, and how much is contributed by miners. I'd be much more confident comfortable knowing these details.
I don't have much data at all about F2Pool. I have communicated with the pool owner a couple of times, but pool luck data is not yet available to the public. I also don't know if the pool does any local hosting.
KNC is my largest concern right now. They now have more than 13% of the network, and they haven't made it easy to find out and track their data. If they want people to be less concerned about them having local control over machines that solved nearly one-seventh of the network blocks during the past week, then they need to be a little more open with their data and their plans.
It makes me more than a little uncomfortable that of the top five block solvers, only one is definitely a pure pool (BTCGuild), and only two of the five provide any public information (GHash.IO and BTCGuild).
1. Unknown block solvers, higher again at 12%.
This week, "Unknown" is up another 1%. I'm quite certain that more than half of that belongs to MegaBigPower.com, and another large portion belongs to another entity i have not yet been able to identify. A reader managed to identify 12ej4RU... as IceDrill, a new investor financed hashing entity. I hope to get some time during this week or next to prove that MegaBigPower.com owns certain addresses and be able to include them in next week's statistics.
Explanation of the tables and charts.
Table 1: Solved block statistics. This table lists all statistics that can be derived from the number of blocks a hashrate contributor has solved for the past week. Block attributions are from either coinbase signatures, known generation addresses or claimed by a particular pool block history. Includes non-Pool hashrate contributors. Note that actual pool hashrates when derived from shares submitted per unit time will be more accurate than the hashrate estimates given in this table.
"Unknown" is not an entity, but simply the group of blocks to which I cannot give attribution using the methods given above.
Table 2: Pool reported block history statistics. This table lists all statistics that can be derived from the number of blocks a hashrate contributor has solved for the past week using all solved blocks - both valid and orphaned - and difficulty 1 shares per round.
A much more accurate estimate of the hashrate, confidence intervals are unnecessary.
Orphan races lost, and percentage of solved blocks that were not added to the blockchain.
"Luck" is the usual difficulty 1 equivalent shares per round / mining difficulty, or (equivalently) accepted shares / expected shares.
CDF: The cumulative density function (CDF) measures the percentage of the time this number accepted shares / expected shares would be less than the calculated value, given the number of valid + invalid blocks.
Bitcoin per Gigashare. This figure is not an indicator of how much a miner should have expected per one billion Difficulty 1 shares (or one thousand difficulty megashares, etc), since it doesn't take into account the reward method or fees charged. Rather, it should be considered as a "luck" index that also incorporates the number of orphaned blocks and the current reward per block.
Since BTC Guild doesn't report shares per block but does report transaction hashes for all blocks, luck calculations cannot be calculated but orphaned blocks can. Pools such as "Discus Fish" that don't have a public pool interface cannot be included.
Figure 3: Percentage of blocks solved each week for the current top ten contributors.
Data is calculated from the number of blocks each contributor added to the blockchain during the week. The points are the actual data; the lines are exponentiated smoothing splines of the log of the data.
