An updated mining comparison for 2020 admist 51% attack accusations
With the recent accusations floating around of DigiByte’s mining centralization, and the fearmongering around the possibility of a 51% attack from some unknown miners, it’s time to put it in to perspective!
EDIT: The original author behind the suggestion of centralization has since retracted their statements and apologized for the misunderstanding on their behalf. Unfortunately several news articles that picked up the story have not been as forthcoming with their retractions / apologies.
The original author believed people were trying to ‘hush’ them on Reddit and remove their posts, when it was simply the automoderator there acting as an anti-spam that had flagged it for review (which was naturally accepted).
This individual has since had things explained to them and they understand how mining works for DigiByte now, and they are sorry for the confusion caused.
So I took Bitcoins base of 100 blocks (16.5-ish hours), and instead did 4,000 blocks for DigiByte (Faster block timings) at the same timeframe. To be honest I was lazy when it came to Litecoin, so their 100 blocks is a little over 4 hours worth. You’re welcome to go do it for yourself for the same timeframe for Litecoin if you want a completely apples to apples comparison but to be honest I simply don’t have time to sync a node and re-do it all for no real difference.
I’m also aware that 16 hours isn’t the “best” view of things, but it’s good enough to give you a better example than what we’ve seen floating around. In this instance I used DigiByte blocks 10732213 to 10736213 (1/40th block timing of BTC so used 40X the blocks).
You can see the original methodology used, along with 9 months ago’s details here, where you’ll see this isn’t some new trend: https://medium.com/@josiah_digibyte/measuring-decentralization-through-unique-miners-410522491665
Let’s look at DigiByte vs Litecoin vs Bitcoin
Bitcoin currently has 4x miners making up 52% of all blocks mined.
Litecoin currently has 3x miners making up 53% of all blocks mined.
DigiByte is not quite as clear-cut as the others though, because 51% attacking DigiByte doesn’t involve just getting more than the rest of the network in one, or two algorithms. It’s actually a lot more complex. That said, here’s the raw graph that I put together in a spreadsheet using the above block information, which is the same timing as used for the other two above:
You’ll note I had to get rid of the white border around each when I made the graph, because otherwise it became too difficult to see them all there’s so many!
In fact there was 170 unique miners for DigiByte in that 16 hour period! During the same time BTC had just 21, and in the 4 hour period Litecoin had only 13.
Side-by-side comparison:
As you can see, if anything, we need to be having some *serious* talks about Bitcoin / Litecoin right now.
Could DigiByte still improve?
Absolutely! Which is why we’re bringing further mining distribution with ProgPoW & RandomX, replacing two of the existing 5 with these two. It will definitely improve, and further strengthen DigiBytes lead in the mining distribution aspect.
As always, I’m more than happy to discuss this kind of thing in a polite and friendly manner. If this is how people start to learn about the superiority of DigiByte, by seeing the *real* stats, then fantastic! My DM’s aren’t open, because I don’t like the idea of things being done “in private”, there’s nothing I discuss around this that isn’t 100% in the open!
But let’s share some accurate info with the world :-)
