And it's followed up by a 22 minute block. Whoever this monster pool hopper is please sod off. And if my conspiracy theory is right please also sod off because it's not funny.
Whilst I am not against the possibility that there could be a bug in the code that caused the pool to find less blocks when the hash rate breaches a particular level, let's look at the facts as they stand and then decide: -
From what I can see, the first time the pool went over 10PH was on the 5th December 2014, although it only stayed over 10PH for a few hours. On that day we found 6 blocks, all valid.
On 8th December, the pool passed 10PH (in fact it did it late the previous evening) and found 7 blocks that day. The pool remained above 10PH for pretty much the rest of the month and in that time it found a total of 125 blocks, of which 123 were valid. This is an average of 5.1 blocks per day.
The average blocks per day for the last few months are as follows: -
4.6 in October - (est. average pool hash rate = 7.8PH)
5.1 in November (est. average pool hash rate = 8.6PH)
5.2 in December (est. average pool hash rate = 10.3PH)
4.0 in January (est. average pool hash rate < 10.3PH)
5.2 so far for February (est. average pool hash rate < 9.3PH)
Looking at January as the worst month in recent times, we see that it started the month at 11.6PH and remained above 10PH until the 15th Jan (finding 65 valid blocks in 14.5 days). For the remaining 16.5 days of the month, the pool never went over 10PH (and was on average closer to 9PH) and found 57 blocks.
I personally would therefore call it luck (both good and bad) rather than being a bug in the code.
Cheers n beers
HP
P.S. In the same 2 periods in January, the BTC guild found 108 blocks and 89 blocks respectively, so our poor run in January if anything other than luck, was caused by something that effected other pools as well.