After a successful launch, Frontier succeeded in his 100,000th block earlier this week. Here are some interesting statistics from these first blocks.
The first 50 blocks of blocks (in seconds):
Just after Genesis, it took 29 seconds for the second block to appear, then 31 and 29 seconds for the following two blocks. Not too surprising that minors rushed with their configurations as the last genesis block has become known.
After these first blocks, we see the time of blocking considerably falling to the assault of larger minors, a floor covering to 1 second which is the limit applied by the consensus protocol.
Now let’s look at the average block time (all 200 the Genesis blocks in block 10000):
We can see the chopping power really attack the network after the first hundred blocks, with hours of block at 1-2 seconds, because the algorithm of the difficulty adjustment catches up with a delay. This algorithm increases or decreases the difficulty of diff / 2048 each block, depending on the time of block.
After a few thousand blocks, we see the difficulty increase enough for blocking hours to enter the range of 4 to 5 seconds. After 9k blocks, we start to approach the target time of 15 seconds.
The largest minors in the first blocks of 100,000 (addresses, blocks,%):
0xef247e639d49461d25f57e9362cade3120910ce0 851 0.81% 0x790b8a3ce86e707ed0ed32bf89b3269692a23cc1 914 0.87% 0x0037ce3d4b7f8729c8607d8d0248252be68202c0 949 0.90% 0xbb12b5a9b85d4ab8cde6056e9c1b2a4a337d2261 1102 1.04% 0x580992b51e3925e23280efb93d3047c82f17e038 1129 1.07% 0xf2d2aff1320476cb8c6b607199d23175cc595693 1141 1.08% 0x47ff6576639c2e94762ea5443978d7681c0e78dc 1159 1.10% 0x1b7047b4338acf65be94c1a3e8c5c9338ad7d67c 1335 1.26% 0xeb1325c8d9d3ea8d74ac11f4b00f1b2367686319 1446 1.37% 0xbcb2e3693d246e1fc00348754334badeb88b2a11 1537 1.45% 0xa50ec0d39fa913e62f1bae7074e6f36caa71855b 1692 1.60% 0xf8e0ca3ed80bd541b94bedcf259e8cf2141a9523 2437 2.31% 0x9746c7e1ef2bd21ff3997fa467593a89cb852bd0 3586 3.39% 0x88d74a59454f6cf3b51ef6b9136afb6b9d405a88 4292 4.06% 0xbb7b8287f3f0a933474a79eae42cbca977791171 8889 8.41% 0xf927a40c8b7f6e07c5af7fa2155b4864a4112b13 9151 8.66% 0xe6a7a1d47ff21b6321162aea7c6cb457d5476bca 11912 11.28%
Although we can never know with certainty if only one minor uses several Coinbase addresses, assuming that they use only one, we have a fairly uniform distribution of the hash power over the 100 klocs of the first. 0X6A7A1D47FF21B6321162AEA7C6CB457D5476BCA with 11% of the chopping power is ethpoolThe first mining pool for Ethereum. Then we have two large minors with around 8%. After these three, the distribution is completely uniform, most minors with less than 1% of the total chopping power.
However, things develop quickly in the Ethereum world and if we look at the last 15 blocks we see:
0x580992b51e3925e23280efb93d3047c82f17e038 327 2.2% 0xbb7b8287f3f0a933474a79eae42cbca977791171 496 3.3% 0xf927a40c8b7f6e07c5af7fa2155b4864a4112b13 612 4.1% 0x790b8a3ce86e707ed0ed32bf89b3269692a23cc1 674 4.5% 0xe6a7a1d47ff21b6321162aea7c6cb457d5476bca 5775 38.5%
Here, it is Clear Ethpool currently has almost 40% of the hash power, and the 2nd and 3rd largest minors are 4%
Affiliate blocks
Another interesting statistic is to look at continuous sets of blocks of the same minor. This can give an overview of the way in which hash power and latency comes into play for great minors.
Early after the launch, most of the affiliated blocks we saw were 6, for example the blocks 1578, 1579, 1580, 1582 and 1583 operated by 0x9dfc037058b7b9eb277421769b56df1395705f0.
0xbb7b7b8287f3f0a933474a79eae42cbca977791171 also operated 6 blocks a few times, for example blocks 656, 657, 658, 659, 660 and 661.
This minor also extracted 5, 4, 3 and 2 blocks in a row several times, not too surprising with 21% of the total hash power at the time.
This occurred very soon after launch when the difficulty increased quickly and many minors had not yet joined the network. While the hash power equalized after the 5000 block, we did not see more than 4 blocks in a row for a while.
However, recently, the most consecutive blocks is 10, for example the blocks 103049, 103050, 103051, 103052, 103053, 103054, 103055, 103056, 103057, 103058 by ethpool. Excluding ethpool, no minor had more than 6 affiliated blocks.
Stay listening for more statistics from the frontier network while we observe it in the coming months!
Gustav Simonsson is a developer in Ethereum Security and Go teams.
