Bitcoin Forum

I understand why people mine at Multipool or Middlecoin. I did a bit of "poolhopping" myself when it was hot, I liked the profit too, nothing wrong with that.
The pools fixed it by adding PPLNS and pool hopping was history.

Now we have "profit switching" pools.

Tonight CAPS got forked when (probably) one of the large "switching pools" dropped >600Mhs/s at it.
This will happen to more coins, no doubt. The pool with the largest hashrate can always cause a fork.

I'm not asking you to stop mining at these pools.

I'm asking to think of techniques / strategies to make it less lucrative to mine at these pools.

Some of you may get angry at me for doing this, understand that I only want to protect the supporting miners and the coins they support.
The real coin supporters only get to mine at high difficulty, at low difficulty blocks get eaten up by the coinhoppers, pushing the coin back to a high diff again fast.

This is not a CAPS vs UNOCS vs MEC vd DGC thing.
This can and will hit every coin, sooner or later.
We need to unite!

How do you think we can prevent this from happening again?

ps. Please be nice to each other :)

Multipool should have more than one port, each port corresponding to physically separate servers, partitioning their hashing power so that  each port can be allowed a maximum of 40% of the minimum network hashrate of the coins on the multipool port.

-Merc

EDIT:  this increases their costs, but they need to be more responsible because overall this is hurting altcoin infrastructure and integrity, especially with so many young coins.

this problem also have small pools too

botpool.net krugercoin
Network Hashrate: 110.821 MH/s    
Pool Hashrate: 101.517 MH/s

What if coins changed diff after each block, enough that a giant incoming multipool would be discouraged almost immediately?

CAP does retarget diff at each block (or two). 

Does it work? as regards preventing multipool screwing with it?

Considering CAPS was just forked, I'm going to say no....Did you even read the OP?

i am pissed off if  if the wrong cap chain goes on. will loose much money.

Could also wake up one morning, and find BTC to be worth $1.00 each. Crypto is a risky business, get over it

Couldn't the coins block a certain IP/port from mining? Thus simply blocking the connection from the monster pool?

Or simply adding code to prevent anything with 40%+ of the hash to connect.

I've never coded a coin or ran a pool, so I'm just wondering. Also, I'm not sure how ethical that would be.

But if you block the pool from connecting... the problem would be solved IMO.

just a thought

profit seeking pools that slam small networks with vastly massive hashrate are clearly irresponsible
the only way to stop this is to dump the price at low difficulty so coins stay out of the top5 for profit

good(and bad) coins will continue to be killed until one manages to gain enough stable hash to survive such an attack

Interesting

If a coin can't handle the rapid swings in hashrate maybe they don't deserve to be alive.  Survival of the fittest at its finest  :)

Does everyone here forget a few months ago when LTC was going from diff 70ish to 900+ in a matter on a few weeks?  It wasn't just a simple up and stay there thing.  People were bitching about how only big time miners can mine it now and that the hashrate got to big to fast.  This is a dangerous market, if you think you can just buy a few gpus and just collect money and never lose out on a high risk investment (which all crypto is) maybe you should rethink your situation and do something else with your money.  This isn't the kind of thing anyone should do to make a living.  Get a job and then worry about high risk investments and if they are worth it. 


EDIT:  I also have asked this in the CAP thread but seeing as the OP here "knows" that multiswitching pools are the cause of the fork, please enlighten me.  I would love to hear the actual technical reason for the fork being miners' fault.  So CAP never had any plans on growing into a large network?

That's one way to look at it.

I not stating people have to stop using Multipool or Middlecoin, it would be plain useless.

I'm asking how we can protect our coins against high hashrate profit hopping pools.
Not only to prevent forks, also for the miners who support their coin but only mine against high hashrate and diff.

When CAP forked, sounds like only cryptsy and bigvern's pool were on the small side of the fork, then they mined 100+ more blocks due to the low difficulty.
 
Now they get to keep those blocks and the rest of of the network will have their blocks orphaned.

The truth is the dev doesn't know what caused the fork and pointing fingers at switching pools is easier than figuring it out.

Here are a few thought about how to make a coin relatively less lucrative to mine by these pools:

(1) Make a coin POS more profitable than its POW. In other word, make ownership more rewarding than mining/dumping.

(2) *Newly* minted coin could take, say, 72 hours to be confirmed... this will cause a high risk of price slippage. Furthermore, long delay will throw a wrench into multicoin pool daily payout. That will make mining heavily this coin a tough choice compare to the other coins. The long term investor/miner won't mind though.

(3) *Newly* minted coin could have a very high transaction fee, which would be offset by doing POS on it for a little while.

(4) Difficulty fine tuning that consider market price(s) relative to other coins. This is likely a tough one to implement and get people agree with... just mentioning it. Some neutrality might be possible if that system is somewhat decentralized by many coin developers, exchange and volunteer servers.

These are just a few seed for brainstorming, I did not do much work into checking for feasibility.

It's not only the fact that CAP got forked, it's also about the miners who support their coin, securing the chain and making the transactions possible.

They only see high difficulty. When difficulty drops, the profit switchpools take the low diff blocks, pushing the diff up again.

A very constructive approach, thanks for your contribution!

I think point 1, 2 and 3 would help solve the problem.

2 is the easiest to implement, I guess.

4 would create some resistance, but it seems you think the same about that :)

Can we defend some little coin if attacker has 3+GHs of power to attack it? Can we defend FTC? No we cant, someone is mining a hell out of it every time he wants to. Only acceptance of coin by many independent miners like LTC has can defend scrypt coin. So when and only when scrypt coin has over than 10GHs it can be resistant. Sorry for CAP being forked, but us small miners wont defend it by not mining on autopilot pools, when someone has the power to fork any time he wants to.

Awesome point.  Its free choice if you don't like it don't use it.

To the OP: Please quit spreading FUD about high hash rates causing forks.  No one and more so the dev of caps has no clue what caused the fork.  If you could OP please answer my question since you "know" according to the OP that the increase in hash rate caused the fork, explain how that actually happened?

Actually it should be pretty obvious what caused the fork, since there is really only one way to have a hard fork: the network was split into two, most likely because one side didn't have it's addnodes set up properly.

I don't blame the dev for not wanting to orphan BigVern's blocks, since if he did that Vern might remove C  AP from cryptsy.

Let's be realistic

I believe there is two sides here: 1) Profit side , 2) Cryptocoin innovation side. One can be in each side

if you decided to be on profit side, there are 1001 reason to justify multipools and blame technology or even blame no one!

if you be on cryptocoin structure, you would be concerned about the future of coins, the future of cryptocoins and their effects on our world, so if you are in this side, we can brainstorming to find a solution.

one upon a time cryptocoin people had a problem called 'pool hopping', they gathered together and found a solution for it.

So, first lets decide if we have any problem or not? and then we can talk about it's solutions.

Do you think there is any problem in a big pool (or a big mining rig) targeting a new coin, take profit and leave when it's not profitable?

Personally, I am concern about automating the mining/dumping part... with some synchronization at a large scale.

I have observe the effect of this on CAP for days. The sell orders are constantly filled, so both price and difficulty get into a cycle of reduction. It remains profitable from a miner standpoint, but it stink from an investor/speculator perspective. On long term, that can't be good for everyone.

I am not as much concern about the size of a given pool (and the fork thing which might be another matter). More automated service will be created and it is now becoming easier to collectively target the same coin. Coinchoose was just the tip of the iceberg.

Solution?
======
Making newly minted coin "special" may address the issue fairly. It will not matter if being produced from a large automated pool or not... it is all about making it harder to profit from mining/dumping systematically.

If you want the price of a coin to go UP, you need to give people something to do with the coin other than dump it for BTC.

Ensuring profits for speculators is not a miner or pool operator's priority and really should not enter into our concerns in any way.

True, but I think the discussion here is to protect the coin against issue (e.g. bearish pressure) coming from its own mining process. Finding ways to make the coin go UP on the market is a whole other subject.

Who will keep buying a given coin in large quantity if speculators have no room left to operate?

Please don't kill the goose  ;)

I understand most are not to be concern about this on short term. I just hope a coin developer is observing and willing to try to experiment about this. It might make a difference on long term.

The coins don't have appropriate error handling for sudden changes in hash rate.  That needs to be added to every coin. The original BTC code lacked this, and everything else has evolved from that.

There needs to be minimum time between blocks, at the moment there is not, and the network will happily accept blocks at any old rate, even injected by an attacker.

This is what I suggested in the DGC thread the other day if you could comment:



The idea would be to make the client software delay blocks for network submission until the minimum next timestamp had elapsed. Someone with a hacked client would have their too rapid block injection rejected by the rest of the network.

We only mine coins that people are willing to buy.  If people stop wanting to buy a coin its value and profitability will go down and we won't mine it anymore.  See PXC.

Right now there are many competing coins and many speculators who want to diversify into them.  The cream will rise to the top, the dregs will fall to the bottom, just like any free market system.

The CAP fork seems to be a perfect storm scenario starting with the bottlecaps pool having to much hashrate then suddenly hanging up stopping 90% of the miners on CAPs most didn't know for quite a bit. Then around the same time frame multipool coming online with CAPs and then throwing a massive Sh*t ton of new miners at it some 760MH's at one point I'm told. All the while this is happening as the first Proof of Stake blocks started to be minted so who knows what that threw into the mix. And folks with bad peers and un-upgraded wallets never help.

I know the bottlecaps devs are working on it and I'm told a new release should be out very soon. As far as which chain yes someone will lose coin from the chain they were mining on or trading on its an unfortunate thing its not the first time and definitely wont be the last time. Best course for these scenarios is know what it is your mining understand what it is your trading and pay attention to events that take place folks noticed a possible fork a bit back. Continuing to mine a forked chain is well a risk probably 50-50. I don't blame the multipools and I think some of the ideas on how to prevent coins from these sorts of things are what all these altcoins are about a grand experiment to figure out what combination, features additions work best.

MANY of these small coins have had pools, sometimes Vern's, controlling >90% of the hash rate.  Few people complain.

Why is it an issue if a multi-pool, running a legitimate client, throws a ton of hash at a coin?  So long as the pool is not malicious it should not cause any serious issues.

It's certainly not the responsibility of the multicoin pools to accommodate turdcoins. I know it's cool to villainize miners as profiteers but like it or not miners incur substantial expenses and many will dump your favorite turdcoin for BTC. The are a few exceptions but for the most part it's not worth the risk for miners to hold mined coins in this currrent environment.

Frankly I've made 10x the profits trading securities than my rigs have made mining alts this year. It's almost not worth the trouble maintaining GPU rigs as my ASICs are much easier and profitable to operate.

So instead of whining about your coin getting stomped on and calling miners puppy killers - release a coin worth keeping. Bunch of damn babies....

-Tin foil hat off-

tl;dr Dump them into oblivion gents!

There is so much irony in this subject it's hard to know where to begin.

This discussion actually appears to be somewhat productive despite the sensationalist title.

Auto switching pools *could prove to be one of the best things to ever happen to crypto.



 

Or...you need to NOT have altcoin exchanges trading alt coins literally DAYS after they are released.  Give them atleast 1 month of release time before listing them.  There needs to be some more stringent requirements to list altcoins at places like coins-e or cryptsy.  Each individually altcoin needs not any regulation (they are all self policing for the most part), but the altcoin exchange market as a whole needs to get together and put some sort of laws or rules in place.  Else this niche market is all the way to the ground.

I agree that multi pools can be blamed for what they are doing.

What we suggest here is to developers, to change their code to be resistant for sudden increase in hash rates.

As someone else said, the big Bitcoin has this problem too and there is not any system to protect it from these situations.

So is there any coin developer seeing this thread? What is your opinion?

This is not in any way a topic against Middlecoin or Multipool. If something is possible and creates a 10-20% extra profit, it will happen anyway, sooner or later.

Question is, like back in the days of "poolhopping", how do we protect ourselves against it.
This will be fixed by one or more coin developers, question is how and when.

Expect it to happen.

Good one :)

We explore the true depths of a zero trust system when the coins have to defend against miners.

Kill the goose indeed.

The more general problem:

1.  There are, conceptually, an infinite number of coins

2.  The dollar average value of these coins will approach zero (finite amount of dollars / N as N approaches infinity)

3.  The average hash rate of these coins will approach zero (finite amount of hash / N as N approaches infinity)

So the end state:

-> Most coins will be highly vulnerable to attack

-> Most coins will trend toward a value of zero

-> Most speculators will get wiped out

This is pretty much the exact attitude that makes multipool as bad as it is... you say release a coin worth keeping? How can it even be kept when profit-hoppers beat it into submission the moment it gets on an exchange? There's no reason for people to be loyal to a coin if it's going to continually get gang raped and left with a high difficulty, not to mention the fact that it causes an abhorrent amount of orphans and risks a chain fork, which isn't good for ANYONE mining the coin.

But that's not the real problem i have with multipool users. What really makes me laugh sadly is the fact that most of those new coins are only 3-4BTC away from a 300% increase in profit. That's what happened with DGC, it had great beginnings and slowly grew with a loyal community behind it. An intelligent speculator sees this and decides to invest 5 btc in it, buying up all the sell orders, and then next thing you know it's #1 on coinchoose for all of two hours and the chain gets raped by multipool and profit hoppers who's combined hashpower is double the original. It's like watching a bunch of retarded chickens scurrying around for scattered BTC feed.

Just pick a damn coin and commit to it! There are decent coins out there that aren't just bullshit clones, profit-hoppers just lack the intelligence and foresight to make a smart investment and look further than the next 24 hours, so they commit their hashpower to a program that does the work for them, albeit poorly. They could actually increase their returns if they had the patience to mine a promising coin and wait for the price to increase instead of being ADD manchildren after an easy buck.

So yeah, whatever, if it's gonna happen it's gonna happen. Plenty of evidence in the world to suggest most people don't make wise decisions, I guess this is just another example.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1499q8LHH1qmwe2no1_1280.jpg

What it a coin does not change it's difficulty rapidly, maybe every 24 hours.

Is that going to help?

Hit the nail on the head.  There has to be a reason for using a cryptocurrency over fiat, and for most of these currencies there is none or they offer no better option than Bitcoin.

It is not sufficient to mine a coin that you continually are rewarded in loss of expenses that can never be reclaimed.

If it is not profitable then it should hold some intrinsic value, like .bit or XPM if you want people with a good heart to invest their livelihood into it.

Stop making clone coins that have zero innovation. If a coin has so little interest that there's only 30MH/s typically thrown at it then it doesn't need to exist. Multipools are the best things to happen to alts since Cryptsy. Without Cryptsy tens of people would still be clinging to the delusion that their pet crap coin was actually worth something. Without multipools there'd be no drive to produce an innovative coin with the fault tolerance necessary to withstand the abuse of a global market. If the next generation of alts can handle the rapid adoption of multipools then maybe they can handle an attack by a more determined player. Who knows, perhaps we'll be spared three page ANN threads for a "new" coin that disappears in 12 hours.

If coins adapt to multipools as you suggest, then the multipools will cease to be relevant, they will spend more time hopping, and less time mining, you will eventually be better off directly mining the coins. The only reason multipools work atm is because they know coins will stay at a certain diff for a number of blocks whilst they hammer them. As coins adapt it will just become a game of Whac-A-Mole.

Yes.

Just want to add here that this strategy is done since a long while because of the coinchoose followers. It is not particular to the most recent multipools. I even did it myself with as little as 9MH/s on a coin.

Some difference particular to multipools are:

(1) Multipools seems to converge the users toward a single pool. In contrast, the coinchoose followers are more spread.

(2) Multipools have to do short term automatic dumping. The dump from the coinchoose followers is obviously less systematic... it was not damaging as much the market (as far as I know).

Two differences causing two different issues.

Anyone else want to propose solutions? Go wild with suggestions, this thread is still just brainstorming.

Since we have many coins that have faster difficulty change than bitcoin, but we don't have any coin has slower difficulty change rate,

My Solution:

What if a coin does not change it's difficulty rapidly, maybe every 24 hours.
Is that going to help?

In this way, when the multipool attack the coin, the block finding chance remains constant and every one have equal chance to find a block proportional to their hash rate.

One downside i can say is that, this coin could be more vulnerable to attacks, since difficulty is not adapt to computing environment around it.

So far the better solution is faster diff adjustment, so the diff ramps up and the hoppers get off the coin faster, leaving the actual supporters time to catch more leftovers while it curves down until the rapists arrive again.

I can completely understand the motives behind these pools, but I can't believe anyone has the balls to call it a good thing.  It's 100% pure profiteering with no concern for even the medium term. 

Long term there's some valid argument that it's an "evolutionary force" but really what that means is things are getting screwed so bad it's forcing change.  The problem is that the change it's forcing is not desirable.  All coins are being forced to respond along identical lines - which will leave them all identically vulnerable when short-term profiteers sort out the next exploit.

Short term solution: lie to them. Coin Choose depends on third parties to report stats about the coins...

Hey yeah nice idea, have the getmininginfo and getinfo etc commands adjust what they pretend the difficulty to be based on whether the daemon thinks there are too many miners jumping on the coin at that moment or not enough miners jumping in it at that moment...

-MarkM-

I'd say Bottlecaps and Megacoin got the diff adjustment close to perfect.

Mincoin is good too.

I am a little curious on this.  All sell orders where bought up - so presumably the buy orders remain (which are the orders coinchoose looks at) - how did this impact the profitability rating besides some psychological upward price movement on the buy side as well?

Or so you think :)

He misunderstands how profit hopping pools work.  In general, the price is less volatile than the difficulty.  The reason profit hopping pools move to coins is usually a difficulty adjustment. (It's possible to switch on price gain alone, but normally the coin in question has to be pretty close to the most profitable to begin with.)  In fact, profit hopping is a misnomer because it implies a reliance on the exchange price.  It should really be called difficulty hopping.

Its the same reason Locusts move to a new field. Easier pickings.

merge mine ... the ultimate unity in numbers....

mo' money, mo' problems

I would think you could crank up the Minted block confirmations to combat this.. Looking at a coin with re-target diff of 90 and 6 confirms on minted blocks. On this example:

Could we simply make newly minted coins have a confirmation time of greater than 90 confirmations (ie 120) so they have to keep mining to get paid out?
I would think this option would be very easy to implement
I think this would deter them because if they spike the dif... and leave then they have wait days to get paid out... thus they will give up pointing @ the coin because it would frustrate them for many reasons:
1. they are not patient
2. They dont care about the coins profitability in X days.. they only care about now...
3. It would be another thing to calculate current profitability, thus coinchoose would be incorrect..

Setting up the minting to a high number would not impact investors, as they know they will get thier coins....and will  continue to mine..

 To the multipools they might mine and leave sticking the diff up high, but if they had to wait 1 day to 1 week when the price might have decreased it would not be as attractive to them...

Fix the code in the coins so they wont accept blocks faster than a predetermined minimum frequency, and use Internet timestamps not peer consensus time.

 

bro if that does happen, please don't wake me :)

People who invent these coins are responsible for protecting them period. If its not a pump and dump, then they better be buying $20k of gpus and mining.

I have switched to using middlecoin because hopping around myself just wasn't working very well and was creating too much work juggling various coins.

The majority of the altcoins don't deserve any respect at all and I don't support them. Once they hit a much larger stage like an LTC, XPM or FTC then I start leaving chunks of money in them longer term. I do have .01 BTC worth of like 50 different coins with auto sells for about 100x what I paid for them as a mini lottery ticket but come on folks there's so many freakin coins that some people are trying to support but in reality they and just buying lottery tickets and backing that coin as their lottery ticket.

If you know a big pool is jumping on a coin then BUY at the bottom of their sell and wait for them to come around again just to sell before them. use the profiteers for profiteering. Don't hate the player, just get better at YOUR game.

Personally I think all these altcoins deserve to die. There is only one true king and this king is BITCOIN !! Let's mine to doom'em all !!

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Please Mine in our P2pool. Fee as low as 0,5% !!!

cgminer.exe  -o wojenny.no-ip.biz:9883  -u PolCoin_WALLET_ADDRESS -p any

get your wallet from official webpage www.polcoin.org

If you create a copy-paste scrypt coin, don't be surprised when it gets raped by a multipool.