Bitcoin Forum

As a noob miner I'm disappointed in the reliability of pools. After a week of mining I'm now forced (due to DDoS attacks on BTCGuild and BeepBit) to start up a third pool account. Is this typical? What is being done by pool owners to increase reliability?

Unfortunately, attacks against mining pools are typical.

Deepbit, slush and btcguild are highly visible, so they get the most attacks. You probably won't even notice most of the time they are attacked, it's part of their standard operations.

Smaller pools aren't as likely to get attacked, but most of them are just using off the shelf pool software and are unlikely to know how to respond when things get bad.

While there is no way to retroactively punish attackers (like courts), you'll keep seeing this. There is money at stake, and it's worth at least that much to take some pools down. Welcome to the wild west, I hope you're quick with the low orbit ion cannon.

I can understand why there are DDoS attacks on for example online casinos and betting sites, but what good would DDoSing a bitcoin mining pool do? It can't be blackmailing.

Griefing, general hatred towards bitcoins. Someone is paying good money just to cause headache to all pool owners.

Those bots could be used for spamming, ad distribution, extortion of small businesses, but no..
They decide to slow down every single bitcoin pool.

Maybe, just maybe, they want to keep the difficulty level down. That's the only financial motive I can think of.

If you're really thinking of leaving those pools you should come join us on Bitclockers.com

Bitclockers > DDos Attacks

Man, these constant pool plugs are really getting to me.

Remove the plug and it drains the pools!


p.s. Awesome pool in my sig (no referral business!)


 ;D

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Thanks  :D

To the OP,

Unfortunately, mining looks in a lot of ways like a DDoS. It takes a very skillful pool operator to differentiate legit traffic, from harmful traffic. And, even then, attackers can be very clever people and can find ways to circumvent many of the DDoS protections that pools put in place.

My best recommendation to limit your downtime as a miner is to look towards the smaller pools, and also look at some of the various failover mechanisms that some of the mining software is starting to come with. That way if your primary pool goes offline (for DDoS, maintenance, whatever) your miners will automatically failover to your backup pool.

not Bitclockers -> DDos Attacks ?   ;)

We've never been attacked ^_^ but that doesn't mean we can't be.

Smaller pools aren't major targets to that kind of thing.

new players tend to be attracted to the biggest pools thinking they will be the "best" - look around at some of the mid sized stable pools, check thier history, then choose a pool :)
You might be plesantly surprised :)

Bigger is not always better, pick a pool with good up time, great support team and even better community :D

Pools could allow users to specify a couple of IPs, and these ips would then be placed on the whitelist when DDoSed. Block everything else upstream. Sure, it'll block some legit miners, but it's better than nothing.

Even having few issue, I'll keep mining with Slush !  I'm in since the begining of his pool.. Is it the first pool that was created ?

Nothing wrong with having several backup pools. Whatever it takes to have zero downtime. If you have about 4 backup pools, you should have no downtime. I keep at least one smaller pool on the list. The large pools seem to get attacked at the same time.

I wouldn't choose that option..

Why Not?  :)

yeah, nah
depends on the DDOS, last year Deepbit when was ddosed one time, it took out at least 2 other pools hosted at same the datacentre as well as caused issues for the host and other customers.
In this situation whitelist is no help.

I go for maximum profits, and the ability to easily tell if all my miners are working correctly. Does p2pool even work with BF equipment?