Bitcoin Forum

Have read some of the threads regarding NMC mining > BTC mining.  Is that still true or did the difficulty factor skyrocket and end the party?

Have also read about BTC pool hopping.  Not clear on how that nets you any gain.  If you leave a pool you have fewer shares for the round and hence make less.  Is there a loophole in how shares are calculated that would let you benefit from having few shares in many pools = more than all your shares from one?

difficulty went back up on namecoin. I wouldn't pool hop, but I would setup different miners on your cards pointed at different pools so you can get the most up time.

Pool hopping is based on the premise of avoiding "blocks of death", those 3+ hour sessions which have the same payout as 10 minute ones.

You abandon a pool to switch to the "freshest" block when it reaches 43.5% (or thereabouts).  If the solution is found before then or shortly after, great.  You get your full share.  If the solution is found several hours after that, great, you've received a minimum of 43.5% for a disproportionately short participation.  Meanwhile you've likely participated in several short blocks in other pools.

I'm unsure but I think the pay for last share pools increase the payout of this strategy over and above simple hopping from proportional pools.

In other words, it has NOTHING to do with connection reliability (you can run more than one miner per GPU each in a different pool if you want that) and everything to do with collecting more than your share for work submitted.

You know, pool hopping is cheating, plain and simple.

You're stealing from the honest miners who participate in those pools.

Pools are a zero-sum game. Your gain is someone else's loss. And since you haven't done anything positive to help find a block -- quite the opposite -- you're stealing the extra, not earning it.

And don't tell me you're using "math skills" to earn more money -- thieves and con men work at their trade as well. It's still theft.

Matthew

How do you know when a pool reaches 43.5% (or any %) since block solution is random?

It is no more stealing than switching from BTC to namecoin mining during the subsidized periods.  It's extra effort, analysis and development relative to firing up a miner and forgetting about it.

Non-proportional pools are optimized to avoid pool hopping.  Some proportional pools are optimized to promote pool hopping, others have various barriers to discourage it.

Expect people do what is in their best interest in a free market on average.  Expecting anything else is not rational.

Troll spotted. You sir are wrong. Pool hopping is a practical solution to earn more bitcoins. Now of course it only works if only a minority of people do it, but if you gain something from it, good for you.

I think you know that and you are pool hopping yourself while trying to convince others not to do it so it's more profitable for you.

This. There is nothing wrong with maximizing your profits.

Anusgelus doesn't know how to pool hop, so he will tell everyone to avoid doing it because it doesn't benefit him.  He will scare you into stop mining though.

You can rationalize your theft all you want.

You aren't putting in 15% more effort to find blocks, but you'll happily walk away with 15% more pay.

Mining namecoins for a few days is different. You're mining something more profitable. You're not stealing from anyone.
When you pool hop, you steal from the other pool members, who make less money than they *should* because of your "optimizations".

That's cheating, and stealing.

It's nice to know the next generation doesn't have any morals.  ::)

Someone tell me which pool Anusgelus is mining so I can personally go there and pool hop it.

Look at how stupid you are.

This is a free market.  Nobody has a gun to miner's heads coercing them to mine in any pool susceptible to hopping.  They have plenty of alternatives and yet they still choose to mine there for whatever reason.

This is precisely what happens with NMC to BTC.  Every other 2016 blocks many NMC miners *choose* to mine at a 25-40% disadvantage to the exchange rate for a month to subsidize a 2-3 day profit bonanza for BTC miners.  Nobody forces them, yet they're glad to do it for whatever reason.  Am I stealing when I only mine NMC when that has a 50% advantage relative to exhange rate subsidized by their month long loss?

Also, I probably have t-shirts older than you.

^ This.

By the way Anusgelus is only 21 and he thinks 95% of miners are 18 and under living in their mom's basement.
That's why he tries to act like a wise old grandpa, and calls miners "next generation" and "young whippersnapper"

By your definition, you're cheating when mining namecoins. You're stealing from long-term namecoin miners.

I agree pool hopping is cheating, plain and simple, and you people suggesting otherwise just shows a lack of ethics.  Nothing wrong with maximizing profits?  So if a pool owner decided to not announce a block won and keeps it for himself, isn't that just maximizing profits?  If you drop out of a pool, you decrease the hashrate of the pool which decreases the chances of a block being found.  That in turn increases the length for a new block to be found, thus taking from the hands of honest miners. 

I for one definitely have the technical skills to pool hop, not that it takes any more technical skills than being honest.  The difference is I am an ethical person and I am in the game with the other miners in the pool.  I will not steal from them, and I would hope they will not steal from me.

tl;dr: you are all a bunch of assholes

There's no such thing as cheating in a free market. Pool hopping is just taking advantage of the weak and defenseless who are too dumb to protect themselves. It's what capitalism and liberalism is all about, so don't fight it - embrace it. The almighty Market will sort it out, so who are you to interfere?

You're looking at it wrong.  Yes, pool operators cheating is always a possibility.  We evaluate it and go with the most trustworthy option.  For example, I like some of the decisions Tycho has made and believe him to be trustworthy.  Which is why my miners are pointed at deepbit as often as practical.

But that has nothing to do with pool hopping.   The solution to pool hopping is for *EVERYONE* to do it, or for no one to do it.  Relying on "morals" to police the population simply means a smaller, less ethical proportion of the population will benefit to a larger degree.  That is of little to no value.

Spreading awareness of the problem and its magnitude is part of a solution.  Encouraging pool hopping until the rewards at susceptible pools approach normal rewards and/or vulnerable pools fix themselves is a solution.  Ignoring it and simply going "nono it's bad don't do it" is useless.

WHAT?!?!?!?!?!?

Yeah, Ponzie schemes exist in the free market, cheating...
There are MANY MANY MANY examples of cheating in the free market...  Bait and switch, false advertising,

Unless you meant your post ironically, in which case please use the ironic emote in the future

I wish that were not the case, but that is probably the most succinct rationalization for pool hopping I have seen.  Claiming it is ethical, is flat out false, but claiming the only way to fix it is to do it, that I can't argue.  Wouldn't it be nice if people would have enough self respect to not sell their ethics for a few extra btc.

Ok, I'll wait a few days and re-post my question in (hopefully) a more hijack proof manner.

I was mainly curious about which would be most profitable:  BTC mining, NMC mining, or BTC pool hopping.

Seems like the latter is the winner but I'm still somewhat at a loss as to how it's done best.  I mean, if I just rotate my miners every 10 minutes or something I'm not clear on how that improves my profit.

I think my lack of understanding is specific to how "shares" are translated into BTCs on various pools.  I know Slush's pool uses a score based mechanism that discourages hopping.  But "straight up" share based mechanisms (like Deepbit, BTC Guild, etc...) seem as though hopping would net you no real gain.  My thinking is that when you hop, you get a proportionately smaller share. 

So I'm not clear on how your "hopped" shares from differ from the sum total you'd normally get by staying with one pool.

YOu need to read a paper on why mining to the 47% CDF point is optimal (the number could be wrong but it should be close).

You can't do that with BTCguild or slush because their stats are delayed.

There is a program which simply re-directs your miners to the pool most likely to yield the highest per-share return.  It's that easy -- track down that proxy and run your miners against it.

You don't round robin, you join the pool working on the freshest block.  The math behind Raulo's Pool Hopping Exploit seems easy enough, but clearly I failed to comprehend it correctly.   I am willing to trust empirical results observed by those running it however, and reported values are consistently 10% over expected payout at a minimum (that's why I used that number in my OP).

Been trying to Google and am not coming up with much.

You search for this one here: http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=3165.0

And you dont mine to 43/47/??% CDF but until 43.5% of the current difficulty (43.5% of ~1.6 million) difficulty1 shares have been mined. If pools switched to diff2 shares, you would need to hop at 21.75% etc.

There is a constantly maintained and (very) fast evolving pool hopping proxy program available just 3 clicks from this thread. all you then need to do is enter your own worker data there, run the proxy and point your miners to the PC that runs the proxy. No other manual intervention needed (other than constantly updating the proxy, as pool operators don't put any terms on their page - but seem to like to "fight" pool hopping as "illegal/unwanted/against TOS").

In this sense pool hopping has also a real risk of loosing BTC due to getting banned/cheated by pool operators

You should join my pool (info in sig). Tripleminig has weekly jackpots of 1.5 BTC and pool hoppers can't take shares from the pool (recent upgrade)

Thanks.  I'm trying to mull over the pros/cons of pool hopping.  The morality argument smacks (to me) of youth.  If anyone can pool hop, then it doesn't seem immoral since the opportunity is there for everyone.  Similarly, if more people hopping would make hopping less profitable, then even more so.

It's like saying you're "cheating" by driving your car more efficiently than its EPA MPG rating.  Technically, you're cheating the oil companies, who like it or not DO influence Washington when it comes to MPG legislation.  So by driving your car more efficiently, you're hurting the oil companies who then have to raise the price of oil, which hurts everyone.  Pretty ridiculous argument, no?  Logically equivalent though.

Good for people (especially young folks) to be *thinking* about morality though.  Shows it's not totally dead.  So I'm not gonna rail on them for it.

All in all you loose at least 1% if you don't do refspamming and the chance to get teh jackpot is also not that high - so a serious miner is far better off with a 0% pool.

It's more like cutting in line - if the line ain't moving fast enough, just skip a few people...

But I think this should be addressed by pool operators if they don't like it. If there are pools that allow it, they're victimizing themselves because it's easy enough to make unprofitable.

You're going to get the highest payout from hopping. Just think about it in a 2 pool world with no other operators. So pool A and B both start mining and you join pool A. After 10 mins, pool B finds a block. Now, all the work you've done for A is basically useless (new block = new work). So if you switch to pool B, you have the same likelihood of finding a block as you would in pool A, but you also get paid for the previous work you did for pool A even though it is of no use in finding the current block.

Basically, you get paid extra if you mine in the "freshest" pool.

It's extra effort, relative analysis and development to shoot at miners and forget about them. This is no more stealing than switching from BTC to mining namecoin during the subsidized period. You know, jumping pools are cheating, simple and simple. You stole from honest miners who participated in the pools.