Quote from: praeluceo on December 03, 2014, 03:49:43 PM

Quote from: mdude77 on December 03, 2014, 12:46:20 PM

Quote from: baddw on December 03, 2014, 03:22:21 AM

I find the BitcoinWisdom predictor to be fairly reliable. It doesn't swing too much. I don't know what algorithm they use, but it's resistant to at least some of the flaws that I've seen with others. I think it must use some kind of upward bias where it more heavily weights the most recently seen high-point for hashrate. This works on an intuitive level because while new mining hardware might be turned on for testing then taken offline while it's shipped out to customers, after a week or two it will tend to turn on and stay on permanently. So if the network hits a hashrate peak and then drops down, it's a safe bet that it will soon hit that level again.

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

Thanks. I don't like bitcoinwisdom at all. I always find it to be wrong. Sad

M

Do you have any citation for that? I use BitcoinWisdom exclusively because it's the only forecast I've seen that doesn't swing wildly (like baddw said), and as it gets closer to the change, it's rarely off by more than 0.1%. For this last change, near the last few blocks it forecast that difficulty would go down 0.88%, but it only dropped 0.73%, so they were only off by 0.15%, not too terribly bad if you ask me. All forecasts are "wrong" in the sense that it's the future, so it's unknowable, but BitcoinWisdom seems to do a really decent job at providing a reliable number that more closely matches how difficulty actually changes, unlike many other mining forecast sites.

I don't look at it often. Every time I have, it was quite different from what reality turned out to be. Maybe it's changed since the last time I looked at it? My app's calculation is based upon number of blocks solved since last change, so as it gets closer to the next change, it gets more accurate.

I really don't know how else you could calculate it and be even reasonably close.

M