Bitcoin Forum

50BTC pool has the concept of teams, and recently one team, avalonchina, was adding hashing power to the pool, like there is no tomorrow (currently at 1,316,183 MH/s and counting). I got curious and cheecked who the members of that team are an how much the contribute individually. What surprised me was that the top contributor is called simply BFL. Now is it Butterfly Labs testing their units prior to shipping, or just some random guy with a lot of batch 1 Avalon miners spreading some smoke cover?

The team's stats page: https://50btc.com/teams/view/3193

Top 10 contributors (speed is in MH/s):

Rank   Name          Speed    Shares    Blocks found
-----------------------------------------------------
1      BFL          557010   2908973    24    
2      Anonymous    274497    798142     6    
3      starsky      119191   2358807    18 Admin
4      Anonymous     72968  64310186    10    
5      Anonymous     69407     61216     0    
6      Anonymous     69254    530615     4    
7      zhaodong      46806    203699     2    
8      chengqp       17257    393520     0    
9      Anonymous      8275     39180     0    
10     Tran Van Huong 7686   1407553     0


An interesting observation is the hashing power required to find a somewhat noticeable number of blocks (aka solo mining at this speed might be profitable).

Another interesting observation is the number of members in the team. Avalonchina has 344 members churning out 1,316,183 MH/s, while the runner-up, overclockers.ru (who historically were always in the lead) have 7170 members churning out "only" 874,336 MH/s.

BFL use eclipsemc.com when live testing.

BFL isn't supposed to do any live-testing, so to say that they "use" Josh's pool when testing is just an assumption on your part.

It's not and assumption at all, it's clearly observable in their product videos and screen shots they have released.

I would certainly hope they have done substantial live testing on all model prototypes at least. I don't want an unproven product.

Wake up...SEE the evidence before your eyes. The link I post is to a Update post by Josh ON the BFL Forum. Open the pic, click again and it will enlarge. Now can you SEE that they are mining @ eclipse ON the network and not on the Test net like promised.

No ASSumptions necessary.


Edit: to add, scroll to bottom of page, last post, that pic.

https://forums.butterflylabs.com/announcements/692-bfl-asic-status-3.html

Ya, Bfly does it again ;D

U are a total idiot ...

There is a thing called the test net

Master BFL SHill

Wrong they solo mine, why would they leave trails at a pool ???
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=226803.0

That link it BS people making wild guesses.

Spreading hashing power over several pools/usernames/btc-addresses together with some solo-mining would be the best way to conceal a large hashing-operation. (If one wanted to conceal it that is.)

All you need is 100 instances of p2pool

You wouldn't even bother, you would just tick private in the list of top miners in the pool instead of typing BFL.

To try and suggest BFL isn't mining BTC while "testing" is just stupid. They have to test the product fully in an actual mining environment. Besides the shady practices they have shown, this is perfectly okay and they make some BTC on the side.

That's not what is being claimed, the claim is that a user called BFL on 50BTC.com is Butterfly Labs, and I see no proof of that.

Lol that's isn't them. They aren't that cocky, very close though. Its called disinformation.

Why does BFL bring out all the stupid?

They can't test the chips without testing on main-net? I guess that's why they claimed that they'd never mine on the main-net right?

They won't mine on any pool except eclipse? I guess since they apparently lied about never testing chips on the main-net, they'd never do anything dishonest like hiding the hashing power they're putting on the net or anything.

I'm not saying that this is BFL on 50btc, but at least make sense about it.

and why cant they use test net and be ethical?

Who is "they" and why would a test net be ethical?

Bfl and ethical because they cant be accused of delaying orders to mine.

So you have some proof to back your claim of Butterfly Labs delaying orders to mine?

I didn't think so.

I never said that. I said they should use test net and you didn't know why. Now you ask another question. You didn't even know who they were.

Lab Rat visited BFL the other day and posted some details of his visit:
https://forums.butterflylabs.com/announcements/3214-first-single-sc-60gh-s-has-left-building.html
https://forums.butterflylabs.com/bfl-forum-miscellaneous/3226-my-visit-bfl-hq.html

He also posted some pictures - of which 2 appear to show miner tests where the miners are connected to Eclipse mining pool..
http://s1284.photobucket.com/user/Lab__Rat/library/?sort=3&page=1

Caught red-handed?

Only for people that can't read, the thread is about mining at 50BTC.com not at eclipsemc.com