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Title: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: marcus_of_augustus on May 29, 2011, 06:46:25 AM What the hell is going on with network hashrate?! http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/ Climbed madly to peak at 4.4 Thash ... and now crashed down to 3.2 Thash ... outside statistical variability. Someone or something had a big push and now has backed off ... first attack? Someone trialling FPGAs? Anyone got the skinny? Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: PabloW on May 29, 2011, 06:48:51 AM Just noticed this too, whats going on?
Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: allinvain on May 29, 2011, 06:55:47 AM What the hell is going on with network hashrate?! http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/ Climbed madly to peak at 4.4 Thash ... and now crashed down to 3.2 Thash ... outside statistical variability. Someone or something had a big push and now has backed off ... first attack? Someone trialling FPGAs? Anyone got the skinny? That I think is related to the flawed way in which the hash rate is calculated after a difficulty increase. In other words the problem is with bitcoinwatch.com Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: Jaime Frontero on May 29, 2011, 07:00:49 AM 8 blocks generated in half an hour...
Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: pwnyboy on May 29, 2011, 07:07:46 AM 8 blocks generated in half an hour... At 8pm EST there were 14 blocks generated that hour, between 8pm-9pm. That'd easily account for a large spike, as the average at this moment according to bitcoincharts.com is 6 per hour. Not sure how much of a window, time-wise, that they use to make this calculation. Closely related, I'm seeing wild variations in the amount of time it takes, within each hour, to find blocks (whereas in times-past the finding of blocks seemed to happen at much more regular and predictable intervals at the lower difficulties). Earlier in the day there were hours when only two or three were found. A far cry from 14. If anyone cares for the raw data i'll include it below, all times EST beginning at 8pm. Also is there some site that lists all, or a large set of the blocks, historically? I'm only seeing the last few on blockexplorer.com. --- 20:07 20:10 20:17 20:17 20:20 20:24 20:43 20:48 20:49 20:49 20:52 20:53 20:57 20:58 21:00 21:10 21:21 21:22 21:47 21:57 22:01 22:36 22:38 22:48 23:03 23:07 23:09 23:14 23:57 0:28 0:29 0:41 0:47 1:04 1:12 1:13 1:30 1:31 1:36 2:08 2:26 2:28 2:31 2:33 2:34 2:47 2:48 Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: marcus_of_augustus on May 29, 2011, 07:07:52 AM What the hell is going on with network hashrate?! http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/ Climbed madly to peak at 4.4 Thash ... and now crashed down to 3.2 Thash ... outside statistical variability. Someone or something had a big push and now has backed off ... first attack? Someone trialling FPGAs? Anyone got the skinny? That I think is related to the flawed way in which the hash rate is calculated after a difficulty increase. In other words the problem is with bitcoinwatch.com So just artifact of the averaging ... how boring. Edit: Would be good if we got some kind of measure for how extreme the variance of the current block generation rate is ... Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: KnuttyD on May 29, 2011, 07:20:22 AM Oops, sorry guys!
Accidently started up a few my ASIC based miners.... Ill try and keep em below 1TH/s from now on ::) Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: marcus_of_augustus on May 29, 2011, 07:30:24 AM http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-2k.png
looks like more than just averaging blip ... http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ (http://bitcoin.sipa.be/) Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: mathx on May 29, 2011, 07:43:15 AM So just artifact of the averaging ... how boring. Edit: Would be good if we got some kind of measure for how extreme the variance of the current block generation rate is ... This is actually troubling. Law of averages say that random wild excursions from the mean without any other input (like someone turning off the NSA's rig :) ) should be very rare, and the larger the excursion, the more rare. Im sure someone is doing some stats analysis to see if this the fluctuations are expected or a very rare anomaly - if they're happenign too frequently, then either ther'es very large flux in computation rate for a reason (NSA, or a major blackout somewhere, or internet outrage), or someone's not aggregating hashrates properly. as you say, tracking the variance and assigning a statistical value to its probability would be useful. cept i failed stats class. Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: Chucksta on May 29, 2011, 08:07:01 AM ALIENS !! it be aliens :o
Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: Vladimir on May 29, 2011, 09:04:12 AM By looking at sipa's charts I can say that if you disregard anything but the purple and red lines than there is no mystery. Sensitive hearts of some OCN script kiddies could not take difficulty change and their GPU's dropped off.
Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: marcus_of_augustus on May 29, 2011, 09:27:50 AM By looking at sipa's charts I can say that if you disregard anything but the purple and red lines than there is no mystery. Sensitive hearts of some OCN script kiddies could not take difficulty change and their GPU's dropped off. Valdimir; I wouldn't be so sure about that because the portion of the power that has gone off-line was largely in the section "Other" on the bitcoinwatch page from what I noticed (icbw) .... I think the OCNers would have been in with deepbit or one of the other pools, can't imagine they are going solo or private pooling ... or? Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: Vladimir on May 29, 2011, 10:13:28 AM Good point.
Than I suppose from time to time when employers see electricity bills some rogue IT people get fired. But note how decline of hash power coincides with difficulty change. It was almost the same before the last time we had drop in difficulty. Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: marcus_of_augustus on May 29, 2011, 10:24:52 AM Good point. Than I suppose from time to time when employers see electricity bills some rogue IT people get fired. Ha! Could be ... there was some interview with IT guy at some school ... can't believe how cavalier he was about using school's power and hardware to belt out some BTC on CPU's ... yeah it is profitable on CPU's if you can steal the power and hardware, eh? http://www.motherboard.tv/2011/5/27/a-bitcoin-lesson-from-a-system-administrator-who-s-growing-them-on-his-school-s-computers Quote But note how decline of hash power coincides with difficulty change. It was almost the same before the last time we had drop in difficulty. yeah, it has the same feel as when last time difficulty dropped .... if it keeps going down I might schedule some maintenance down-time to get things back to scratch ... Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: Vladimir on May 29, 2011, 10:34:52 AM Ohh you mean this one...
Quote You work at a school, and your job is IT Director essentially? Yeah, so I have access to the root account of a lot of the computers in a lot of the labs. I figure this summer, when the computers aren’t being used, I’d basically have my own little server farm. Now explain what you are doing with the computers and Bitcoins? On the computers there’s a Daemon that runs at startup that basically calls a specialized script; each of the computers has its unique username and password, logs into a server, gets a chunk of mathematical work to do, and reports back when it has a solution. And how many computers do you have running it? Right now I have it on about 15. I haven’t decided yet whether or not to to scale it up to the maximum I could do, which is about 60. Is that illegal? Well, Bitcoins are legal. Using the computers to do this? I am pretty sure that’s a grey area. I’d be hard-pressed to tell you which law I was breaking. I am pretty sure my employers wouldn’t be thrilled if they found it though. Do you think they would even understand what was going on? Most likely not. I am sure that school's legal counsel will be less hard-pressed to find a few ways to press criminal charges on felony level (in US). Ignorance is rather bad defence. Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: Sukrim on May 29, 2011, 10:37:40 AM 15 school computers accounting for 1.5 TH/s?
We can be lucky he didn't vring all 60 online then... ::) Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: pwnyboy on May 30, 2011, 03:59:44 PM I again saw 12 blocks generated in an hour yesterday, during a time when Deepbit was offline. This is way outside the normal statistical variance, given the loss of hashing power. It doesn't just rain packets out of the sky; it's pretty clear to me that the two are directly interconnected.
Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: ffe on May 30, 2011, 04:15:56 PM See
I bet someone controlling even 1% of capacity could, through the amplification of other miners joining him once they notice, cause hard/easy cycles where production in the easy cycle is more than twice desired production. Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: Sjalq on May 30, 2011, 04:32:01 PM Is the fear security? I'm not following why folks are concerned?
Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: rezin777 on May 30, 2011, 04:42:32 PM See I bet someone controlling even 1% of capacity could, through the amplification of other miners joining him once they notice, cause hard/easy cycles where production in the easy cycle is more than twice desired production. The fluctuations are occurring inside difficulty periods, not coinciding with difficulty changes. Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: speeder on May 30, 2011, 04:50:57 PM One guy in IRC mentioned throwing 10.000 CPUs in the sunday (22 of may of 2011) at his university, then he got found out and had to stop doing it.
Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: Sukrim on May 30, 2011, 05:16:11 PM 10 000 CPUs at ~5 MH/s (and this is VERY optimistic!) = 50 GH/s. Would be a barely noticable fluctuation in the current hashrate.
Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: xenon481 on May 30, 2011, 05:32:46 PM 10 000 CPUs at ~5 MH/s (and this is VERY optimistic!) = 50 GH/s. Would be a barely noticable fluctuation in the current hashrate. ~5MH/s is very doable with Ufasoft's SSE2 CPU Miner. A Core2 Duo 2.2Ghz gets ~5MH/s. Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: KnuttyD on May 30, 2011, 05:55:32 PM It is very possible that we had a botnet come online. Not very difficult to find a nice sized (30K - 50K) botnet these days.
Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: no_alone on May 30, 2011, 06:42:57 PM It is very possible that we had a botnet come online. Not very difficult to find a nice sized (30K - 50K) botnet these days. Its will be hard to the botenet to install ati opencl stream in every PC... Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: pwnyboy on May 30, 2011, 07:07:49 PM Its will be hard to the botenet to install ati opencl stream in every PC... That's not necessary. Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: allinvain on May 30, 2011, 10:25:46 PM It is very possible that we had a botnet come online. Not very difficult to find a nice sized (30K - 50K) botnet these days. Its will be hard to the botenet to install ati opencl stream in every PC... The botnet operator just needs to install the UFASOFT SSE2 miner and tadaaa...instant hashing monster. Assuming he could somehow select for intel i7 or intel SSE2 capable CPU and he can get 12 - 18 Mhash from quad core chips (this is for intel i7 - 12 Mhash is easily achievable even with 3 cores) Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: Vladimir on May 30, 2011, 11:23:51 PM Mining botnets?
Can you see how useful bitcoin is for people! We actually will improve security of residential computers en masse. This is because now hapless users will have much better chance to notice that something is wrong with their computer and it eats CPU and electricity. Thus they will secure it. Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: Raize on May 31, 2011, 02:32:18 AM I wrote a script to use Ufasoft's miner silently in the background only when no user was logged into a PC (state=Inactive).
I'm a network admin for about 2,000 PCs. I wouldn't run it on them, but I verified I was getting 10 MH/sec for the model we currently use. So yes, I think if someone had 10k PCs and could pull 10 MH/sec on each or push out the latest ATI drivers to the machines that had video cards for a university lab you could see this happening pretty quickly. I would like to imagine the maintenance guys at universities and other public institutions would catch on to this sort of thing, though. In a corporate environment I would imagine it would be nearly impossible to do. That being said, I could imagine a lot of gaming studios with high-end PCs maybe having some sys admins pitching the idea of running a Bitcoin network to their bosses. Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: marcus_of_augustus on May 31, 2011, 02:42:38 AM I wrote a script to use Ufasoft's miner silently in the background only when no user was logged into a PC (state=Inactive). I'm a network admin for about 2,000 PCs. I wouldn't run it on them, but I verified I was getting 10 MH/sec for the model we currently use. So yes, I think if someone had 10k PCs and could pull 10 MH/sec on each or push out the latest ATI drivers to the machines that had video cards for a university lab you could see this happening pretty quickly. I would like to imagine the maintenance guys at universities and other public institutions would catch on to this sort of thing, though. In a corporate environment I would imagine it would be nearly impossible to do. That being said, I could imagine a lot of gaming studios with high-end PCs maybe having some sys admins pitching the idea of running a Bitcoin network to their bosses. Yes, and rendering farms. Animation studios and ancillaries have large GPU resources ... not sure if they Nvidia based or ATI. Although they probably keep them pretty busy making flics. Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: Jaime Frontero on May 31, 2011, 05:36:00 AM Mining botnets? Can you see how useful bitcoin is for people! We actually will improve security of residential computers en masse. This is because now hapless users will have much better chance to notice that something is wrong with their computer and it eats CPU and electricity. Thus they will secure it. useful indeed. by 2030 or so we may have brought 30-40% of the population of the world into the 21st century. which is a helluva lot better than we did with the 20th, by the time 1930 rolled around - and people were still emulating ancient roman emperors bringing in massive blocks of ice to cool their homes and food (while electric light bulbs dangled from their ceilings). the power of money... Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: phelix on May 31, 2011, 03:03:02 PM check out this diagramm: http://bitcoin.atspace.com/mysteryminer.html
I just found it with google. probably from Raulo. I will pm him to explain how he gets the data. very interesting. at ~400GHash/s it was more then half the network power for a short time. Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: Raulo on May 31, 2011, 03:28:02 PM check out this diagramm: http://bitcoin.atspace.com/mysteryminer.html I just found it with google. probably from Raulo. I will pm him to explain how he gets the data. very interesting. at ~400GHash/s it was more then half the network power for a short time. Yes, it was. The graph was made by analyzing activity for this wallet http://blockexplorer.com/a/ALEwEXxVGo Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: marcus_of_augustus on May 31, 2011, 04:23:02 PM check out this diagramm: http://bitcoin.atspace.com/mysteryminer.html I just found it with google. probably from Raulo. I will pm him to explain how he gets the data. very interesting. at ~400GHash/s it was more then half the network power for a short time. Yes, it was. The graph was made by analyzing activity for this wallet http://blockexplorer.com/a/ALEwEXxVGo Follow the trail and see here it all sits .... 49,000 BTC http://blockexplorer.com/address/1JYdudjausg1VUzosifETZbuLAevyPgnza some days in late Feb. early March he was getting easily 50% .... what about those early adopters eh? Wonder what he had access to? Server farm, botnet, super-computer, render farm? ... the way the block rewards are collated into chunks may reveal something. Title: Re: Return of Mystery Miner? Post by: no_alone on May 31, 2011, 04:53:49 PM check out this diagramm: http://bitcoin.atspace.com/mysteryminer.html link not workingI just found it with google. probably from Raulo. I will pm him to explain how he gets the data. very interesting. at ~400GHash/s it was more then half the network power for a short time. |
