Bitcoin Forum

Is the Bitcoin falling ? DDOS breaks almost every major Pool!

Again as I said before. I would ask the developers to change the protocol in the future bitcoin client release to:

1) Include GPU mining.
2) Change the default mining model across the network to be "cooperative share-based mining" !!!.


This is how we get a really distributed currency and replace the mining pools with a distributed cooperative mining model.

AND bye bye 200-dollars-per-DDoS-attack-third-class-rent-my-ass-for-200-dollars Russian hackers!

the only thing left as a centralized model is the exchange provider(s).

This is the second time I call for that!

Anyone hearing this?

Anyone responding ?

I don't think pools being DDOSd affects the prices that much in any predictable way. In fact, it could drive prices up with less inflation. I'm not sure why you are being so alarmist. There's not a great need for these changes to be put into the client.

The only problem with this is that it won't work. You should read the tech paper.

The network is fine. Still chuggin away at 10.611 th/s. The DDOS'es have done nothing to make "bitcoin fail". Just a few pools that need better DDOS protection.

Even if every pool were DDOS'd and they all broke, permanently even, so what? It doesn't affect Bitcoin, pools are just a way to make mining give you money more immediately. (not faster, as there's a slight fee and theoretically the amount of time it takes you to get 50 BTC with a pool is the average amount of time it would have taken you to get a block by yourself)

Bitcoin doesn't rely on pools, pools rely on Bitcoin.

Well, statistically, at 1 gh/s, I will never hit a block mining, (assuming 30% difficulty increases forever). So a pool does pay me faster, because I should earn about 20 BTC from a pool in the next infinity (again, assuming constant 30% difficulty increases).

Good point, hadn't factored in difficulty increases.

As an extension of what DamienBlack was saying, how many miners would solo mine at todays difficult? If pools ceased to exist, what percentage of miners would stop mining?

Just look at the "other" section on Bitcoin Watch  :)

But, to the point of the OP, this is in no means Bitcoin failing. Individual pools may have failed, but interestingly enough, the network adapts. One pool goes offline, people move to others. The more diversified our network is, the strong it is.

The hash rate has actually gone down massively today.
Network total rate is at 5.4 blocks per hour.

Also, all the big pools have had insanely long rounds today (just look at deepbit or bitcoins.lc history in the last 24 hours).
It *could* be luck, but if it is, it's a hell of a coincidence.

All of them have gone through the longest round in a month today. Even the small ones like triplemining.com are undergoing ridiculous rounds.

Currency isn't inflating as quickly, sky is falling?

Good point. I haven't really tracked the blocks/hour stat, and Bitcoin Watch's network hash rate graph looks screwy.

I do find it odd then that so many people would leave their miners idle rather than to setup a backup pool, or 2 or 3.

All things considered, though, of the pools that stayed online today every one of them looked like they enjoyed a growth in hash rate. So, at least a non-negligible amount of miners took precaution and picked backup pools.

I thought of a more elegant way to illustrate my original point.

Let's say there are large groups of people who all play the lottery, with the promise to split their winnings if they win.

Saying that if these groups were taken down, the lottery would fail, is just as silly as saying that if pools go down, Bitcoin will fail.

Most people play the lottery alone. Most people don't mine bitcoins alone.

Mining solo at this difficulty level *is* a lottery. Your chances of ever earning anything are very, very low.

These were theoretical groups. The point is the same.

Well, not very, very low.  You would on average win one block of 50 coins every 50 days mining solo if you had 2.7 GH/S of power and the difficulty didn't increase.  In fact over a year or so, you will on average come out ahead on your own rather than pooling because of the pooling charge.  The problem is that difficulty has been increasing so quickly that you are chasing a target that moves faster than you can catch.

Pooling basically allows you to pull the future 50 coin win into the present so that you can mine at the current difficulty level instead of the much larger future one.  The price to be paid for this benefit is the pool charge.

Just to play devil's advocate. If everyone playing the lottery was doing it in pools then we wouldn't know the future of lotteries after lottery pools fell. Maybe people would switch to going alone, maybe they would quit.

Regardless, 'pools' the idea aren't going anywhere. Some particular pools might, but that's as relevant as a few office lottery pools being canceled.

I do not agree solo mining must be bad.

Are people always more afraid of loss then thinking of possible extra profit? (afair studies say that yes, x2 more)

Look at it this way,  assume 2.6 GHash solo.
Assume diff doubling each month (same affect as +30% but easier calculations)

You will on avg. get a block once per month.
You have 50% to get a block in 30 days.
(http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/old_calculator.php (http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/old_calculator.php))

So in pool after a month you get 50 BTC, then 25 BTC, 12.5, 6.25, 3.12 = 96.8 BTC
after more month you would get close to 100 and then some pennies monthly.

So 100 BTC in 5 months in pool.
Solo, you have 50% chance to get in this time same 100 BTC or even 150 or perhaps 200 BTC.
Also you could get 250 or 300 is very lucky - but also you can get just 50 or even 0 if very unlucky.

Mining Solo is NOT less profitable at it does NOT mean you will get nothing - you may get nothing but you may also get much more then from pool, even +50% more is not that unlikely.

It is the risk of getting 0 BTC what scares people it seems.

Exactly, the expected returns may be better for solo mining but the variance of results makes it into a lottery.  The great majority of miners prefer the rather steady returns yielded by the lowest-variance, largest mining pools - despite the slightly lower expected return.

I generated two blocks as a solo CPU miner a year ago, but would never consider solo mining today.

That is why I said we should CHANGE the default protocol. And yes it affects the overall network computation power!

And as far as I understand from the technical paper. Bitcoin can be taken out if you can afford computation power larger than the sum of the network.

I am talking about the worst case scenario. Let us say three of the major pools have been taken over and hacked! then what! a faulty blocks can be introduced!

not just slowing the total network computation power due to DDoS. But the whole thing can be wiped out!

what I am saying is that we can convert the whole network to one large gigantic pool with all the miners working WITH each others. And the only things that can take this out is to block the BTC traffic all over the internet.

So everyone is working in cooperation Yet every one will be still competing for larger share. umm maybe extra digits can be introduced as 8 digits after decimal point might be not enough.

Away from how much hard effort to see this accomplished. but what will be the disadvantages of this suggestion ?

Bold red text is really not going to make your point any more valid, or your post any more readable.

My apologies but is it against the forum policies ?

otherwise i do nto think your post is relevant :)

I have no idea if it's against the forum policies, I'm just trying to make a point that it's extremely annoying and hard to read.

That something is not outright forbidden does not mean you should do it.

Bitcoin without pools would be even harder to break. Pools are a threat, DDoSing pools is helping bitcoin against that threat.

Aren't you going a little too far?

That's not how it works, thankfully. You can grab all of the coin creation and prevent transactions from going through (until you get nuked from orbit), but you can't reverse most of the transactions (exponentially more difficult the further you want to go back) or steal people's balances because you don't have their private keys to sign transactions with. For other things you could do you also need control of the majority of the clients, which controlling all the pools in the world will not help with.

We'll end up learning our lesson if the major pools get DDoSed one day, simultaneously. The way things have been escalating, I wouldn't be too surprised if this happened.

That's only a problem if there are no smaller independent pools and individual miners left and a concerted attack is mounted in the form of a large attacking pool trying to subvert the blockchain, but this means a lot of investment and once the big pools return they might have done some work that will invalidate the bogus links in the chain anyway. In fact, if it comes down to a catastrophic event once they are back the big pools could decide to cooperate on fixing the blockchain (sort of like a Mt. Gox rollback :)).

The average botnet operator will gain more by simply participating (have their own pool if other big pools reject them).

I don't support DDoS. But its just nothing we have to worry about.

Even if mining pools are DDoSed, the people who actually have the mining hardware will be interested in continuing mining (because else their hardware is wasted). Even if the number of miners drops significantly, Bitcoin will be able to operate -- you just have to wait a certain time (depending on how much the hashrate drops) longer for confirmations. After difficulty recalculation, everything is like it should be again.