The problem with The Genesis Block’s Mining Dashboard

Let’s take a moment to applaud all the work that The Genesis Block has done to make Bitcoin mining and Bitcoin news more accessible to the masses.

However, in the interest of probity, I must point out the inherent flaw in TGB’s Mining Dashboard which I fear many, many people are overlooking.

http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/

When you input data to TGB’s Mining Dashboard, they only allow for 1 difficulty change per month. While past data is used to generate a realistic monthly difficulty increase factor, the fact of the matter is that difficulty changes happen at least twice a month, and more recently thrice a month.

Let’s take the month of September as an example:

On 01/09/2019, difficulty was at 65,750,000

Block 256032 on 04/09/2013 at 04:21 marked an increase of the difficulty to 86,933,018

Block 258048 on 14/09/2013 at 23:44 marked an increase of the difficulty to 112,628,549

Block 260064 on 25/09/2013 at 14:09 marked an increase of the difficulty to 148,819,200



A newb with the option to buy a brand new BFL Single rated to run at 60 GH/s off of craigslist at the end of August would have been referred to this mining dashboard by the netizens of reddit and TGB’s mining dashboard would have calculated him/her a cumulative return of ~$1,700 in the first month, which relies on the ridiculous assumption that the difficulty remains stagnant for one month

In reality, said newb would have only mined for 3.5 days at a difficulty of 65,750,000 as opposed to 30 as assumed by TGB’s mining dashboard; then, he/she would have mined 10 more days at 86,933,018 then 11 more days at a difficulty of 112,628,549, and then the rest of the month at 148,819,200. See the problem now?

TGB’s estimate: ~$1,700

Reality: A lot less

What’s the solution?

It is.. difficult.. to predict the future bitcoin mining difficulty or even when exactly in the 10-14 day period it will change, but The Genesis Block really needs to fix their model to consider bimonthly or trimonthly difficulty increases to match with reality. With this, TGB’s Mining Dashboard would become the go to guide for accurate difficulty predictions, as opposed to spotty exvel sheets released via bitcointalk.

-bxbxb