Feathercoin Hash rate variability 1st to 4th August 2013
-
I note over the weekend the Feathercoin network peaked at over 5.6 G Hash/s, driving the Difficulty up to 204, higher than (during the last major confirmed network attack attempt?) in June 2013
The Hash Rate has now reduce by half to 2.6 G Hash/s. I see this as a negative consequence, whatever the cause, the effect is to leave stable miners mining at a high difficulty and low hash rate. The missing currency can be harvested later by high hash miners when the difficulty goes down.
I attach a chart showing the relevant block production rates Comparing the End of Month Averages for July, as Aug starts. Red marks Sunday. So most off the hash peaks start on a Thursday, as was played out this weekend.
I would be interested in anyone’s opinion of why or how these increasing Hash Rate are currently ocuring. A change of 50% seems too big?
Over the weekend there was a damped increasing difficulty that should have put people off? Is it just weekend miners?Are the difficulty changes of Blocks being calculated correctly? i.e. are some miner using old clients and not implementing the 40% if they are “attacking”, or forgot to update?
However, I do note, if this was an attack, the peak variation of block rate I saw was about 50%. They still would have found half the blocks and could then set their own time and difficulty on those blocks to maximise their advantage.
The chart should show if the damping will keep the hash rate high or help to recover it, and maybe too many blocks were produced, early in the hash change, will be balanced by less as the hash stayed higher later. We’ll see over the next few days.
[attachment deleted by admin]
-
The big jump in hash rate is due to the huge increase in price of FTC it more then double on Friday and is now back down, but still higher than before the increase.
so we got 0.002BTC with Diff 200, now we have 0.0014 BTC and will retarget to 144 (should keep stable if price don’t move). previously we had 0.0007-0.0012 and various diff in the 75-144 range.
so price/difficulty give a profitability ratio. for FTC 0.0001 ratio seems to be the approximate switching point for “opportunist” miner to switch (yes I know other coin profitability play a role also and coinchoose greatly show the profitability compare. in case you want to compare with other coin you need to add time between block and coin reward)
I don’t have look in great details as I was busy over the week-end, but I have not seen sign that would normally occur with attacks. but I would not be surprise to see one soon as high diff going down seems to be where the attacker previously start attack most of the time.
-
Cheers Groll, I did notice the Feathercoin price went up, when I was looking at the hash rates on coin choose.
Weird that (exchange) price affects mining so greatly, you’d think people would just sell?
-
First 80-90% of the “opportunist” miner don’t care of ALT coins, they hash them for profit as it’s more profitable then mining BTC
most “opportunist” yes: mine and dump. those are profit opportunist. In fact this is like working on the most profitable task, and selling immediately reduce your risk of working for less profit as you don’t need to weight the coin future value. so they convert to BTC/LTC or even fiat. this include the middlecoin pool that trade in quasi real time the mine coins for BTC
some “opportunist” are semi-keeper: they use crypto switcher, multipoll.in, switch by hand. They will just switch and possibly make some market analysis to higher their profit, but often if you get high on coinchoose: your price is relatively high so sell fast is a lesser gamble. but usually they are not keeper for long time. so on this week-end most should have dump
some “opportunist” keeper: but would mine chosen coin with more stable/predictable price and choose lower diff then average to mine and get more coins(should not be in this equation for this week-end in FTC). they keep them in hope of future value increase
with BTC diff very high the “opportunist” are 6-7Gh/s from the 2Gh/s 2 month ago.
you have also 2 other types that are the strategic and the believer:
strategic: evaluate coins and mine the one they think should be suitable and would give over the long run profit, so would mine unless they revaluate the coin (seems we got some of those for 500k-1Gh/s in the last month that is pretty good). for them diff is not really in the equation unless it get out of control and make it less appealing even for long term like it was in mid-May.the “believer” are another story that are the one that mine because it is FTC(difficult to measure but should be around at least 500K as mid-May high diff showed).
