Feathercoin Transactions and mining Difficulty - 48 Hours 21/5/2017 - Completed
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Feathercoin - Analysis of Block Time, Difficulty and Transactions quantity and values.
Overview and Conclusions
This analysis is a routine check of blockchain timings and activity. Over 48 Hours … from 19th to 21/5/2017
The average block time over 48hrs is good at 1:02
The charts are showing a positive increase in transactions / transaction values / amounts and baseline mining over the previous analysis.
The percentage of blocks with transactions has increase to 50% of block. The transfer to fee rate is also higher at 371%There were no suspicious time anomolies in the blockchain timings for the 50 hour test peroid. All 3 time anomalies were Blocks with the same time.
The analysis is ongoing but the preliminary data analysis is on Github :
https://github.com/wrapperband/FTCBlockTimeAnalysis/tree/master/2017-05-21 FTCTransactionAnalysisFeathercoin Block Analysis*
FTC is routinely analysed if there are any concerns. These analysis are stored on Github to use as templates or review historical analysis.
Values of the parameters analysed can be extracted from FTC debug file. The ABE software used to produce sites such as http://explorer.feathercoin.com/chain/Feathercoin?hi=1721682&count=1000 does some of this work for you, so for sporadic analysis of a few days it is convenient to scrape the data from there.
Normally the web site displays up to 100 blocks but this can be expanded manually.The data is accumulated in a text document, then pasted into the spreadsheet template from the last analysis. Charts and calculations data ranges are corrected as required.
Overview of the 50 Hour period up to 21/5/2017
FTC Fees over 48 Hours 223920
Transactions less fees 83186838.30
371 % Transaction to Fee ratio
Percentage with Transaction 51.00
Average Block Time 48hrs 1:02 minsBlock Time Trans no. Value Diff CoinDaysDest Time TranTrue TimeAnomaly 1724191 2017-05-21 10:02:52 2 216.05 9.83 12.42 00:57 1 1724190 2017-05-21 10:01:55 1 80 9.837 0 00:00 0 1 1724189 2017-05-21 10:01:55 1 80 10.001 0 00:33 0 1723314 2017-05-20 18:33:27 1 80 21.076 0 00:05 0 1723313 2017-05-20 18:33:22 1 80 19.671 0 00:00 0 1 1723312 2017-05-20 18:33:22 1 80 18.359 0 00:08 0 1722811 2017-05-20 10:03:41 2 25689.66 9.66 171.62 00:49 1 1722810 2017-05-20 10:02:52 1 80 9.666 0 00:00 0 1 1722809 2017-05-20 10:02:52 1 80 9.666 0 00:15 0 Feathercoin Price charts
Monitoring the FTC price chart on https://bitinfocharts.com/feathercoin/ , showed some anomalies with the Bitcoin to FTC price. The USD to BTC price had tracked up until recently and had divided, possibly due to a BTC price drop. That requires more in depth analysis as it may be due to trading in a third currency by the main exchanges.
The expanding and high levels and novel variation prompted the analysis.
Feathercoin Difficulty
This chart shows the variation difficulty as the hash rate of different (coin switching) pools is directed towards FTC. The red chart is seen to vary cyclically at about 15 minutes.
The blue raising line is the block against time. The less variation in has, the straighter this line will be, so it is an indicator of how much the difficulty calculator (eHRC) is being stressed.
Comparing this to previous charts the average difficulty, and the rate and frequency of variation have increased. It looks like there are more switching pools forming some more complex time signature paterns.
Feathercoin Block Times
In this chart the green lines show the actual block times. In this case there was one high block times > 10 mins, and there were more block times > 8 mins than usually seen.
Comparing block time chart to the 25/10/2017, for instance, there seems to be a lot more 5:30 min blocks than usual.
Feathercoin Number of Transactions
This chart shows the normal level of transactions, scaled down.
Feathercoin Value of Transactions
This scaled chart shows the value of transactions level.
Feathercoin Block Time Average 110 Blocks 26/10/2016
The average block time for the 50 hrs was normal.
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@Flatback ello there, Dr Wrapper ‘senior bruder’…,
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-https://forum.feathercoin.com/topic/8883/feathercoin-analysis-of-possible-maximum-transactions-block-dustcoin-attack-25-10-2016
-https://forum.feathercoin.com/topic/8886/feathercoin-transactions-and-mining-difficulty-48-hours-21-5-2017-draftif u dun mind, can u elaborate a bit more about it for… a simple-understand…?
as for a conclusion as a noob me here, dat post show a summarize about ‘there is something happen on d mining-network’, is it…?
by dat, d block production is delayed…?
‘someone’ @ ‘somebody’ is causing dat on purpose…?
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again, soori if dis disturb…It is a big subject. Most of the changes we have been forced to make to Feathercoin are because of outward pressures.
One of the changes I did was eHRC (enhance Hash Rate Compensation), which extends the method Bitcoin uses to set to the “Difficulty” of the calculation for the next block, and ensure the next block is done at the right time, for Feathercoin this is every 1 minute.Feathercoin, in the past, when it used LTC ASIC do the POW mining , meant LTC pools could switch over to FTC, mine as quickly as possible, then leave the loyal miners with a high difficulty - and long block times. So, Wellenreiter help me invent, evaluate and test eHRC.
Other coins came up with kimoto-gravity-well, which is great, but highly complicated and difficulty to understand and had lots of extra calculations (more work to do / lower efficiency than eHRC).Bitcoin and Litecoin partially solved the switching by having their own ASIC, so no one could switch to them. However, not fully and are subject to pool switching.
The point being is the switcher can turn on significant hashing when the difficult is low, they get more coins than when high. That is one reason Admins have helped with p2pool, to make it easier to get a stable base line Hash rate.
We started the Charts to test eHRC against KGW. There are long threads about the development on the forum
Mining has moved over to coin switching pools, where FTC is a popular choice. The charts show the extent FTC is being attacked / mined by coin switchers, and how well eHRC is keeping the block time to 1 min.
I also look for any time anomalies where one blocks timing is in front of another (can happen but is sign of “stress”.)
The charts are also showing a positive increase in transactions / transaction values / amounts and baseline mining over the previous analysis.
Which has given me an interest to do them and share them here…
The chart for the 25/10/2016 shows a type of “attack” called a “Dustcoin attack”. Which tries to spend thousands of the lowest amount, or dust level.
This, didn’t raise any issues. There are still question marks about, why it stopped at 1100 per block (we think 1MB) - In which case, I am postulating it was Seg-Wit Bitcoin guy doing a cheap test (10,000 transactions) of what would happen on flood.
I would assume there would be some effect on the block time (due to the fact that eHRC can only react ), the less variation the more stable the block time will be.
However, preliminary, it looks like FTC could handle more transactions than they could send a minute, but the jury is still out to further info.
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I personally very happy how FTC fights with jumpers-profitability hunters. I thought that here we have KGW, but I will check what eHRC is and it works very well.
Thanks team for great solution!
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Thanks @Lordas Here’s some notes on eHRC
KGW (Kimoto Gravity Well) was invented by Mega coin, other coins like Frankocoin were talking about trying (and asking our opinion) so FTC threads were disusing what FTC settings would be for KGW.
When I proposed eHRC as a simpler solution Bush agreed to include it in a fork with Neoscrypt and block time change to one minute.
Wellenreiter and I ran many simulations to find optimum settings, when they performed as well as KGW, it was decided FTC could go with our own solution. There were other advantages, for instance KGW was complicated, if there was a bug, we wouldn’t be vulnerable. eHRC used standard, tested Bitcoin methodology, with only minor settings and code changes.
The test were designed to check eHRC is working, and by looking at the pattern of reaction you can also see how hard or when it is being stressed.
Bitcoin calculates the difficulty for the next block by periodically calculating the average time for the last few hundred blocks.
FTC enhanced this by including a short and long term average, and recalculating the difficulty at every block.
Hence, enhanced Hash Rate Compensation or eHRC.
This means, as a high hash rate pool or miner switches over to FTC, this will shorten the time to the next block, because the difficulty is too low. So eHRC increases the difficulty.
However, once the switcher leaves, the short term average returns to normal, and the long term average predominates, reducing the difficulty, but maintaining the overall block time to 1:00 min.
Documentation and Help
I tried to cover some documentation on most things, FTC historical and technical, in the Feathercoin Wallet Guide :
https://github.com/wrapperband/FeathercoinWalletGuide
The guide is meant to be a beta version and we require patches from anyone who has a computer, and find and push changes to all the deliberate mistakes I put in it.
The guide and this post were created as examples of how Github change control is important and how it works …
Where’as previously, we created guides on the forum, and they became out of date, I have demo-ed here how we can leverage Github change control to maintain documentation.
At a simple level, the Github “readme.md” can be copied / paste to a post. Using Markdown means you can include images as well. When you push a new image it automatically updates the post …
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@wrapper said in [Feathercoin Transactions and mining Difficulty - 48
The chart for the 25/10/2016 shows a type of “attack” called a “Dustcoin attack”. Which tries to spend thousands of the lowest amount, or dust level.
This, didn’t raise any issues. There are still question marks about, why it stopped at 1100 per block (we think 1MB) - In which case, I am postulating it was Seg-Wit Bitcoin guy doing a cheap test (10,000 transactions) of what would happen on flood.
I would assume there would be some effect on the block time (due to the fact that eHRC can only react ), the less variation the more stable the block time will be.
However, preliminary, it looks like FTC could handle more transactions than they could send a minute, but the jury is still out to further info.
I can provide some info here as I was the “attacker”. I simply setup a loop to send dust to another address I control. I used my VPS as the sending wallet so the loop probably just ran as fast as the VPS would allow which could be why it limited it to 1100 transactions per block. It could also have hit the block limit of 1mb, but Im not sure how to tell if that was the case or not. I honestly thought it would be a lot higher than 1100.
I seem to recall setting the loop to 30,000 but also that not all the transactions went through, or atleast not what I expected to see. My oly monitoring tools were a blockchain explorer which could skew my data.
The purpose of the test was simply to see how the network would react. Nothing malicious intended.
I will say that this reinforced my issue with crypto and dust. I now have a wallet (the receiving wallet) with 38,000 transactions that total 2.7FTC and I cant do anything with it due to it being all dust.
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Hey, @AmDD Thanks for taking the time to explain what was happening, we don’t get a chance to check the analysis on an anonymous network.
I was under the impression you should be able to conglomerate your dust payments back into one address. It would be worth looking into that a bit more, maybe @Ghostlander could comment…
FTC Block chain analysis
FTC Admin’s run a “planned” condition monitoring maintenance system for FTC. Explorer, support tickets and Members / Admin observation of the network highlight any changes from normal operations. One of analysis capability and template spreadsheets have been created to look at FTC specific parameters, like for eHRC. Some monitoring methods were created to test changes, like eHRC, others to investigate issues. (**)
Just to be clear, AmDD is talking about a test of the network on 25/10/2016. Which triggered a look at FTC Blockchain performance, from examining the FTC to LTC historical transaction frequency.
The analysis in this thread is 21/5/2017, which was triggered by the previous analysis, to compare with current details and the general increase in FTC mining, price and transactions over the last 3 months …
(**) FTC has no payed employees, wrapper is a chart contributer, other members have helped.
The analysis is ongoing but the preliminary data analysis is on Github :
https://github.com/wrapperband/FTCBlockTimeAnalysis/tree/master/2017-05-21 FTCTransactionAnalysis
