Bitcoin Forum

After reading a thread on pool hopping, I am a little discouraged by the number of people who think there is nothing wrong with pool hopping.  Now, I am wondering if I am in the minority here, so I ask you...  is pool hopping ethical?

everybody's moral standard is different. asking the question just brings more meaningless arguments, same as if you ask if downloading mp3 is ethical.

And why would it matter either way?  If your moral code is based completely on whether or not taking advantage of others is ethical you'd have no way to function in a modern society without just about every one of your actions voilating your moral code.  Starting with eating, receiving a salary, using financial institutions, driving...

Why would you draw the line at other bitcoin miners lining up to give you money?

I draw the line at causing undue harm to innocent people.  None of your examples results in me causing harm to people, by pool hopping, you are taking money away from people who are content with receiving their fair share for their work.

I like to quote this:

The people to blame here are the pool operators, not the hoppers. It's the operators who encourage pool hopping through their hopper-friendly payout schemes.

To make matters worse, a large number of the miners who are being "cheated" WANT the hopper-friendly payout scheme. It's hard to argue that someone's being cheated when he asks for it.

Exactly what error said.

Pool operators benefit from the largest possible pool membership.  They don't take a hit for pool hopping.  It's no accident that the pools named in the "other thread" have shown tremendous hashing growth lately relative to others.

Some pools are optimized for pool hopping.  Others are optimized against it.  The freedom to choose which one to use is up to you, no coercion is involved.

Also, if you live in the first world and don't think your standard of living comes from harming people living in other parts of the world you're deluded.  I won't go into detail, you can get there yourself by starting with a google for "third world exploitation" and "human cost of globalism" or even, most pertinent to this audience, "third world electronics recycling."

none of them ban it in any TOS or when you register.

there are very simple methods to prevent hopping.

If they dont prevent it how can I care

+1

I actually moved one of my miners for pool hopping.

Here's why it matters.

A better question is, is it sustainable? And the answer seems to be...nope, and it won't last much longer. Most of the pools are shrinking while BTCGuild, Deepbit, and Slush are looking like they are going to be the only winners.

One crazy thing about the bitcoin community is that the 'clever' guy is more common than the 'average' guy. Or you could say, the average guy for the bitcoin community is a clever guy.

It's funny...I'm not at all an expert on academic approaches to ethics and morality, but one of the famous ideas from the field does apply here: Kant's categorical imperative. Basically, 'what if everybody did that?' Generally, a clever guy can say 'well, most people aren't clever so we don't have to worry about that nyah ha ha!' But the bitcoin community doesn't work like that.

What if everybody mined for a while on a small pool, then jumped off before the block was finished? A plague of grasshoppers...

Well, it is working more like this: what if the majority of miners did this? Then the minority of honest miners would gradually leave for bigger pools. When the hoppers come back for the next round, they find a major reduction in the pool's overall hash rate. Some of the hoppers look at the trend in rates and decide sensibly that it's not worth coming back to this particular pool at all next time. It's a death spiral.

The small pools seemed to be doing ok when it was still a few days avg per block. Now that it's about a week or more for a lot of them, they're falling off.

Can they change their payout structure and survive? Maybe...but maybe not. It'll be challenging for a pool that has lost a lot of its average hash rate to get people to come back. How should they do it?

As with almost all questions, you have to define the scope of what you define a problem before you can ask if something is a problem, and you of course did not, or else the answer would be clear and the thread would die.

So I argue that the question has no meaning but to the individual. I don't pool hop, though I can't say that I am averse to the idea. I consider it an annoying and legitimate strategy given the current climate. Anyone can do it, the tools have been provided free of charge by gracious people, and the benefits have been clearly laid out. As has been stated the pool operators don't care and/or encourage it. The action itself causes harm to no one except those that actively choose not to engage in the practice because they are lazy or don't understand the benefits or whatever, and are free to engage in the activity themselves.

So, I don't engage in it, but I see no problem with it. Don't like it? Support a pool that does not allow pool hopping and/or solo mine.  Simple.

I haven't.  I expect the free market to take care of this for me.  I invoke the fat-and-lazy-trumps-beliefs defense and simply mine at a not vulnerable pool.

So your argument is basically:

"It's the victim's fault -- they made it TOO DARN POSSIBLE so I couldn't resist!"

Or, to compared it to a more physical form of theft:

"It's the store's fault I shoplifted -- they didn't have adequate mirrors/personnel/security, so they were practically BEGGING to be shoplifted from. It's not MY fault!"

Let's see, why not apply that logic to other crimes as well:

"She was so hot, your honor! You should have seen how she was dressed! It isn't my fault I physically overpowered and violated her...she was BEGGING to be raped..."

Talk about a slippery slope. Such an argument makes a mockery of morality.

The problem with your argument is that absolutely nothing is being stolen. Pool hoppers are playing by the rules as laid down by the pool operators.

 ::)

None of those examples are applicable. Raping a girl isn't a zero-sum game. Taking an item someone else paid for using force or deceit is not zero-sum either.

The closest example I can think of would be going to work at a few jobs only at the time of the day when a boss showed up to make rounds and check on if people are working or not, while everyone else was working 9-5, and drawing a check from each one instead of the people doing more work getting a raise. A rather convoluted situation that most people would consider ludicrous, and I highly doubt anyone would equate with raping some girl.

Again, the tools are there for everytone to freely pool hop if they wish, and in fact if everyone pool hopped statistically payouts would even out for everyone as though no one were poolhopping. If they don't like pool hopping they can go to pool-hop unfriendly servers or solo mine. Pretty simple solution to a perceived problem.

We are in a hobby that needs constant tweaking. We must tweak for the better.The extra 3% using the new phoenix tweak, the better pool for less stales, taking out a hard drive to save on energy, Windows versus Linux, and finally to hop or not.

The pool owners can stop it if they wanted too, but they do not.

I need to get the most from my setup, if you do not thats cool too. My morals are extremely low, so it does not bother me.

There is one way to stop the poolhoppers:

Start poolhopping yourself... It only works if a small part of the users do it...

I can say the same thing to someone who spends money adding more GPUs to their own farm:

By spending $2000 on GPUs and mining with them, you are taking money away from people who are content with receiving their fair share for their work.  You raise the difficulty of the whole network and I make less money because of that.

There are still people who don't believe pool hopping robs them of anything.  And some are quite rude when you try to reason with them.  I say it is morally sound to pool hop these people.  The pools that make a good faith effort to prevent pool hopping should not be robbed in this method.

I should listen to my own words. Now that hopping has gained more traction (used to be a very small group), I need to look at which pools are getting hopped and either change the miners on thre to hoppers or move my hashes elsewhere. I'm lazy so someone help me out here, where is the list of commonly hopped pools?

Pool operators only benefit from large pool membership if the members actually submit shares. It makes no difference how many members a pool has if they all desert the pool as soon as the pool is taking 'too long' to solve a block.

And they do take a huge hit for pool hopping. When legitimate miners get a below-average payout, they desert the pool. Fewer legitimate miners means fewer people submitting shares when the pool is taking too long to solve a block. This means the pool spends much more time in the low payout state. This means much lower performance for the pool overall.

There is a difference.

If I mine with 2500Ghash/s and don't poolhop, I get my share for the work my miner has done.
If you poolhop with 2500Ghash/s and poolhop, you get your share for the work your miner has done and even a bit more from my share.

At least you admit it.

There's nothing further for me to discuss with those like you.

(Mental note: Max in Montreal can't be trusted -- never do any business with him, lest I lose my money/item)

Hopping is as ethical as shopping several places for your groceries to get the best prices.
I can chose to shop all my groceries in one place, or go several places to pick the best offers.
Am I cheating or stealing from my local grocery shop? No.

It's more work to shop several places, as it's more work to update/maintain the hopping proxy (another downside is having your earnings spread across a number of pools).

But as long as there's pool operators willing to pay me more for mining with them than the alternatives, I'll point my miner to them.

Edit: Am I cheating/stealing from other miners? No. They are free to make the same decisions that I have. Mine one pool for convenience, or hop around for profit.

Guess what, at least BTCguild + deepbit are definitely hoppable and slush probably too... once the "easy" small pools switch to porper payout structures these are next on the agenda for hoppers - 2 pools is better than 0, and you can earn a LOT on both - given the high hash rates there.

Delaying stats etc. is by the way NOT helping, just making it a bit more interesting to hop (and if you keep the code for yourself, they might even stay proportional longer, giving you a nice profit for longer times)

I sell bitcoins to fellow canadians using instant bank transfers, and I have done many successful transactions so far. I always make sure to get the cash before I send any coins. I am trying to get a good rep for doing business with people on these forums, and to scam somone out of their money, I would ruin my rep for being honest.

With difficulty increasing we need every edge we can get, it is competition out there, don't blame me, blame the pool opperators for allowing it.

Before you comment, please give me one example where a pool opperator does not allow it, and is trying to stop it...Those are the pools you should join.

.

You promise?

There is a paper written somewhere and a good discussion here on the forum on how a pool opperator can easily stop it. Find it, its a good read and might change your mind.

AngelusWebDesign , seriously though, I'm sorry. I am sorry if I made you cry! ;)

Look at the comment right above yours, btcguild is going out of their way to discourage pool hoppers, and yet he triumphantly claims to still pull it off.

I would agree that anyone who thinks it is perfectly ethical to pool hop is an unethical person and I would not casually do business for them...  after all what other ways do they "maximize their profits"...  If I want to buy a card from someone, maybe they don't mention it locks up after an hours use.  After all, that is just maximizing profits. 

You can rationalize it all you want, but you have to acknowledge it is only a rationalization.  I'm sure you have yourself convinced, but people like me do not see it that way.  We see it as dishonest, and the people who do it as dishonest.

You're welcome to your opinion, however mistaken it is. I still have not yet seen anyone post a coherent rationale for pool hopping being unethical which stands up to even a cursory analysis. Would you care to try it?

That's now how rationalization works. If you admit that is what you are doing then it fails to work. Your characterization of it as a rationalization is a fallacy as well, especially when you state that you are coming from a different perspective. If you can come with a logically conclusive line of reasoning as to why pool hopping is "unethical" I'd be interested. But for now I've heard nothing convincing, and my own thinking on the matter is that it seems fine.

This is how rationalization works: you get a perfectly logical reason why pool hopping is unethical, and your brain filters it before you even give it due consideration.  

Case in point:

You start at pool a
After x minutes, you do not get a block, so you move to pool b
the hash rate at pool a just got smaller, you might have been the one to find the block, but now it will take that much longer because you left
Therefore everyone who stayed at pool a now waits longer to get that block, and while you got 10% more, that 10% is split as a loss to everyone else

Thus you are taking money from honest miners.

People who pool hop are not extra savvy, you are merely taking someone else's math and someone else's code and saying: look how smart I am, I get an extra 10% yay!

I am now wondering just how much money I am losing because of pool hoppers, thanks guys

Damn, I didnt know we had such a tightly winded bitcoin community.

Bitcoins is current an arms race, every edge is important. Do you think its all fairies/pixies and every man should get his fair share?

If money is involved, the person who can find the biggest edge comes out ahead and that is what bitcoins relate to atm, trading is the game and value for trading is the ingredients.

As soon as there is more use for bitcoins the madness of finding a new edge will arrive.

We may aswell add a tagline to bitcoins, "The morally just Currency".

Embrace it and stop sounding like a bunch of priests who feel they must confess 24/7.

We all choose what game we play in life.  One of the level 1 games is exactly as you describe: "Pigs at the trough".  I, for once, choose not to step over everyone else for the slightest advantage, and I disagree that every last percent needs to be squeezed out.  People who feel that way care nothing for the fellow miners or community, only care about taking whatever they can get at whatever cost.  Not very enlightened if you ask me.

Nice try. The problem with this is that it assumes things which are not true or not proven.

First, you have not made an argument that a pool hopper is dishonest; you have simply claimed it as if it were obvious. I asked for an argument and you give me nothing.

Second, it is not true that a pool being hopped pays miners in a fair manner. The reason people are able to make money hopping is that the pool offers to pay miners more under certain circumstances and less under others. Thus proportional payout schemes are inherently unfair. It can be argued that if the payout scheme WERE fair, then no one would hop the pool.

Finally, you have not addressed the issue that the miners supposedly being "cheated" -- including yourself -- go out of their way to seek out pools with such unfair payout schemes!

Do you think the bitcoin value will increase and become self sustained with moral(still a questionable statement) pansylike characters, or aggressive market movers? Think long and hard over this. The average joe doesnt move the market, they simply sell of their coins by using the gains in value adjusted by big movers.

By your own example this would be unjust and unfair, the smalltimers are getting compensated for no extra work. Look at it as you like but its the same thing, getting paid more for less work.

I really dont see the point to explain that your argument about poolhoppers walking over regular miners is completely bullshit. I will leave it at that ;)

It sure will fume up everyone some more :)

Hey Clipse If it would increase my edge, I would become one... ;D

Hehe thats exactly my point, being a pansy doesnt bring great joy ;)

Im on the edge of glory!!

It is obvious, gaming the system for an unfair share is dishonest.  The scenario I described is evident of an example of how you are gaining money while others are losing it.  See my first statement, you simply passed over it and refused to even give it due consideration because you have your rationalization in your head.  It's like trying to convince a Christian that the idea that the earth is 6,000 years old is ridiculous, you have your vision of the world, and without realizing it you dismiss the evidence to the contrary.  


Proportional payouts are perfectly fair, if miners were honest.  The fact that they aren't means that the pools have to find alternatives.  The PPS scheme is problematic, since it pays regardless of a block being found, and the pool operator can lose money.  I'm sure there are other payout schemes, and hopefully they will be implemented, but that takes time and shouldn't even be necessary if it weren't for the pigs at the trough.


Again, I did, remember, I mine at btcguild where they go out of their way to discourage people like you.  Problem is, there are still people who try to game the system, and I find that despicable

by driving your car you're polluting the air other people breathe

Being content taking what you have earned doesn't make you a pansy, it makes you honest.  If the cashier gives me an extra $20 in change, and I return it, that is honesty.  I should be more appreciative to my mother, I guess I was raised right.

when a pool is being attacked do you guys jump ship? or do you just wait it out. How long do you wait till the pool comes back? at what point do you switch pools? Why?

Ok so we admit that I am honest. I do the work, and the pool pays me to do it. We are telling them their accounting is off, and they must correct it, but they do not.

So back to your example whith the cashier...you tell her, hey you gave me 20$ extra, and her reply is so what...and you keep going back to the same store and every time she gives you 20$ extra, you let her know, but every time you tell her, she says so what...and she owns the store too. Explain to me how that is being dishonest?

Holier than thou mode detected..................................

Your first statement? I read and gave due consideration to everything you posted. You have not yet shown that pool hopping is "gaming the system for an unfair share." Try to focus on that, and show SOMETHING that backs up this statement, if you can. Claiming I ignored something that wasn't there to begin with is useless.

More to the point, why should someone NOT switch to whatever pool he thinks will pay him the most for his shares? Sure, if "everyone" did it, then pool operators might finally switch to "fair" payout methods when their hashing rate drops to the floor. But many operators have little interest in doing so. And that's a practical argument rather than a moral one.


While you're at it, what constitutes an "honest miner" in your mind?

And yes, there are perfectly fair payout schemes which make pool hopping unprofitable, such as Menni Rosenfeld's geometric method. But most miners don't want to use pools which use this method. Why not?


I haven't mined at BTC Guild for several weeks and I had no plans to start mining there again.

wait a second wait a second, wait just one second...why is it better to mine in a pool in the first place? somebody else finds a block and you profit...that is so not cool... ;)

I just looked at the votes...25ish for yes and about 14ish for no. by the way, the person voting no comment...by voting you left a comment...

so about 35% think its wrong? I would have thought it would have been closer to 50/50.

Every pool hopper is a 100% honest miner! They submit shares like everyone else and receive their fair proportional share of the block as everyone else. The only difference is that some miners seem to decide that it is "fair" to just stick to a single pool, even if it means that you're mining at a loss.

I would call it unfair and dishonest to demand such stuff (mining at a loss) from others.

I think that is the best argument!

Personally, I don't agree with pool-hopping, since that feels like taking advantage of others so while I could, I don't do it.

Objectively, I can't say it's unethical if it's something everybody who wants to can do it and if the pool operators does not object to it. If a hopper is using a pool to hop despite the owner doing something about it, then I would consider it falling on the side of unethical. It's like you telling somebody NO but he/she keeps doing it (eating your food, shitting on your floor, whatever) just because you are not slapping them or bringing out your shotgun yet.

So in practice, I would say if the pool owner is doing things like delaying stats and obfuscating details, despite whatever reasons they might have for not being able to implement a more thorough/better solution, then it would be unethical and disrespectful if a poolhopper continue to use those pools for hopping.

An ethical assessment means the 'hoppers in question must know what they're doing causes other people problems. I started hopping from pools that took to long to solve a block mostly from boredom. I actually thought I was taking a coinage hit to do so at the time, but it didn't worry me overly.

Then I read about pool hopping and started to demand pools that I used change to scoring which I thought would work (eg Meni's algo). I started to move to other pools but every new pool that pops up is proportional. The only way to encourage pools to not be proportional is to hop them and then let the miners there a) know what you're doing and b) let them know they're losing cash by you doing it. Bitp.it is a good case in point and now they are no longer a prop pool (Yay! for bitp.it!)

So your question is hinging on whether people know what they're doing is 'bad'. There are likely a lot of 'hoppers doing what I did - jumping off a pool when it got boring, and not knowing it causes problems for full time miners. Are they unethical? Or is it only unethical if you use hopping software? Then is it less unethical if you detune the software to have less of an effect on the pools you use? Are ethical levels infinitely divisible?

The only solution is to get rid of prop pools. Even if every intentional 'hopper stopped now, there would still be plenty of unintentional hoppers hopping. Pools need to redo scoring systems so that unintentional hoppers and folks lots of downtime (eg when other people need their computer) are not penalised.

My preferences:
Meni's algo
XXPPS (ESMPPS, SMPPS, PPS)

You are never mining at loss... Sometimes the pool is lucky, sometimes it's not... Variance is a bitch...

You only want the luck and leave the non-poolhoppers with the bad-luck of variance...

It's unfair, but if it makes you feel good, go ahead...

Only if you have promised not to do it. Putting in a share in a pool is not a promise to continue putting in shares 24/7.

You just convinced me.
I think everyone should start poolhopping.
More profit for everyone!

Please do and look at the outcome, we will all benefit in this forum cause believe it or not, we arnt the only people using pools (this forum probably only a fraction of current pool users )

As soon as you submit a share in a round that takes longer than 100% of the difficulty, this share will be worth _less_ than what it should be worth (according to PPS calculations).

Once a share is provably worth less than it should be worth (which is the case with Prop. pools that have long rounds) I am willingly mining at a loss to "support" a pool or whatever. As I did not sign any contracts with pools stating that I'll only mine with them, when I start making losses, I move on.

Show me the TOS of any prop. pool that forbid pool hopping! All they do is delay stats to make it more difficult etc. but still noone explicitly forbids it.

The term "ethical" comes from the Greek "ethos" while "moral" comes from the latin "mores" - both meaning the exact same thing: "customs."

It is a modern misnomer to think that one is different from the other as they are simply transliterations of the same word and it would make more sense to say that we're confusing "personal ethics/morals" with "societal ethics/morals" - the prior being entirely subjective and the latter being largely objective and measurable. Of course since this would appear to be the first real attempt at actually measuring the objective beliefs on pool hopping, the result of this pool should determine the objective morality.

I do agree with your last sentence, though. No one is forced to mine at any hopper-friendly pools and many have explicitly chosen to mine at such places because they prefer the payout schema to hopper-resistant methods like PPLNS et. al. There are a scant few who mine at such pools not understanding a thing about the risks (most newbies mine at the huge pools like DeepBit, Eligius or BTC Guild anyway, all hop resistant) and the onus of choosing the right pool for yourself is on YOU.

What if pool hoppers put a positive spin to the the game?

Les say, you hop to pool X and then you jump to next, when you are at your N rate from difficulty and so on.
What if you hop back to the pool X, when they are in trouble and are cranking at 50+ h block? Jump in, help them out, suck some honey from the first shares and move on. But do not forget to hop back, when they actually need you,  
For example, look at the Triplemining.  52 hours and counting, 3 855 573 share and no end is sight.
    
Poolhoppers can bring 50-80 GH/s power to any pool.
Pool-hoppers, its time to give something back to a small pool. It will be really cool and I can bet, most small pools will make the real time stats etc available to you :) and you probably end up earning more than now.

Cheers!

Sure thang... I would accept this proposal as long as all pools are proportional. No reason for me to do this with hopping if I dont have a chance to earn more by clearing a small block, that way I wouldnt mind helping out to clear a long block later.

We don't need grasshoppers... We need miners...

This is actually a pretty decent idea. The pool-hopping scripts I've played with so far all have "backup" pools that are mined when none of your other pools are under the magic 43% mark. I doubt it would be that tough to change the logic up a bit to mine whatever pool has the highest share count during these times instead and I'm sure it would make us all the more welcome at already hopper-friendly pools (or pools which are undecided). I'd be happy to see such a change. I'll see if I can bash it out myself and I'll also suggest it to those who control the code for the major projects.

I'll go out on a limb and claim that since about 2/3 don't do it, despite about half of that not thinking it's unethical, that as perhaps objectively most of us don't find a technical reason against it (like in my personal case) but subjectively feel it's not the right way to do things.

Pretty much like there isn't any rule that says we can't be nasty to newcomers so technically/objectively nothing wrong if somebody be nasty to newcomers. But most of us wouldn't deliberately be nasty to those who come after us because individually, we just don't feel it's right even if there isn't an explicit rule against it.

75 total votes at this moment, 29 say it's unethical and 46 say it's ethical: that's 61.3% in favor of hopping and 38.6% against. I wouldn't call it the world's strongest majority, it's not quite 2/3rd majority even and 75 votes is not exactly a statistically significant sample of all miners, but so far I'd call it "gray area" and qualify that with "but there are somewhat more for than against"

Non pool hoppers in proportional pools' logic:
"Oh look, I found a penny on the street! I'll just stop and wait until the next one appears and get RICH!"
 ::)

Again: Pool hoppers earn 100% fair. They just earn more than others, because others are mining when it means mining at a loss too.

Even I can get behind this idea.  I'd be more than willing to donate some time to the development of it.  Question is, would people use it?

I read it differently as 62.6% don't do it (subjectively not in favour of hopping), but almost half of this 62.6% don't have a technical reason against it (objectively not against it).

Perhaps, we would have a clearer picture if the poll had been
1. It's ethical
2. It's not unethical (i.e. Don't think it's good but there's no legalistic reason to judge it as bad)
3. It's not ethical

How are the two similar? From what I understand (not being an stocks player), shorting is when you sell what you don't have because you believe it's going to drop so when you cover your position, you pay less than what you sold it for. Basically, the other person thinks the reverse and both of you are gambling you're the one who's right, isn't it?

Pool hopping is more like somebody going "Heck, this job's taking too long for the money I expect to get, I'm going to work for that company now but expect to get paid more than the rest of you when you guys finally get the job done." Sure everybody else has the option to job hop too, but is that really right even if there's no "law" against it?

no poll option of "i don't care, i just need the $."?

Yes, as there are many more opportunities to work somewhere where this is NOT possible (at least not without giving "job hoppers" a statistical advantage) as there are job-hop-exploitable companies.

Also it's now known for half a year how pool hopping works. Still new pools (even btcguild!) open up with proportional payout and then act "surprised" that they get hopped.

All in all, no pool writes on its page:
* No botnets welcome
* Pool hopping not allowed

As a result many pools get already used by botnets, get pool hopped etc. and operators seem to just treat the symptoms mostly.

If you (since February) mine 24/7 in a proportional pool, you KNOW that you will loose BTC to pool hoppers in theory (and since ~2 months in practice).

No. Pool hopping in unethical because it breaches the implied contract between the miner and the pool. There is no such implied contract between stockholders. It's like seeing a "free, take one" sign and taking them all.

Yes, it would be like taking the whole bowl of candy on Halloween when someone puts out a bowl of candy on their front porch -- expecting each trick-or-treater to take just one or two pieces (possibly indicated explicitly with a sign).

There are many members here that have no morality -- that take whatever they can get away with. The only thing stopping them from breaking into your house and stealing your stuff is the presence of police officers.

If TSHTF (EMP attack, epidemic, nuclear attack, etc.) this country would be a real hell-hole. So many people without morality, completely selfish, dog-eat-dog...

There is no need to break into anything - pool hopping is rather comparable to first checking several online shops for the cheapest current prices and then buying there. Interestingly, a lot of "steady customers" of some (web)shops then start to complain that these people are cheating and everyone should buy at only one shop. Ever. With the only reason given, that the shop they are buying from sometimes is more expensive than others and they are so good customers that they STILL buy there, so they are definitely BETTER HUMANS than these immoral people that dare to first look where to buy. How can they be so selfish?! Surely hell will break loose...


Luskily it's 2012 soon anyways with the end of the world and stuff... ::)

I don't think that's a good analogy because the lazy person doesn't choose to live in the communist society specifically because it gives an advantage to lazy people. I think taking the whole bowl of candy is a much better analogy.

DING DING DING! WE HAVE A WINNER!!!

Such a guy wouldn't be highly looked upon -- by women OR men. So I guess that's a good analogy. Such a guy would be deserving of ALL KINDS of names and epithets. And the more guys became like him, the more horrible the world would be.

And since there would inevitably be guys who envy the fact such a guy is getting laid, however disagreeable his methods, they start to copy the methods. Sounds like Bitmole's got a winner for the best fitting (so far) analogy.

could someone explain to me what pool hopping is?

Pool hopping is the practice of moving your miners between multiple different pools based on which pool has completed the least number of shares towards its current block. By doing this you increase your chances of getting overpaid on so-called "short blocks" while simultaneously ensuring that you're never stuck on an unlucky pool as they spend many times longer than average working on a so-called "long block"

It's controversial because, in theory, hoppers are "stealing" coin from people who remain dedicated to the pool by participating only when it suits them rather than when it helps the pool. There are a number of methods pools can and have used to combat hopping, such as using a non-proportional or time-shifted algorithm or even by refusing to publish or simply delaying their stats to make it more difficult to find how far into a block they are.

On the other side, it's also argued that pool hoppers bring considerable hashing power to bear on whatever pool is luckiest at the moment, which both allows these pools to publish higher overall hashrates (thus attracting more miners) and increases their chance to have "short blocks" a more substantial portion of the time. I'm not sure if any meaningful analysis has been done to show whether the increased number of blocks found from hopping outweighs the amount of coin the hoppers "steal" from the pool.

In any case, it is on the pools to allow or prevent hopping and it is on the user to select a pool with a payout system appropriate for his or her mining style.

I fail to see how pool hopping has anything to do with ethics...  if it does, then you can extend the same argument to mining in general.

if you wanted a more "appropriate" analogy, you'd have to consider a miner (for whatever resource: oil, gold, iron, salt etc...) going from one mine to another and working for some amount of time (doesn't even have to be equal).  mine hopping essentially.  is this ethical?  well, it has nothing to do with ethics.

hmmmm


but all this is very "controversy", right?


because, short blocks and long blocks could happen any time... you can have 3, 4 or more short blocks on a determined pool over an hour or a long block over 2 or 3 hours in the same pool...

and about stealing, I don't think it could be defined as it, because, when someone join your pool to get a short block, the others miners from the pool who the hopping miner left could get a short block too, right?

It's all very controversial, hence all the quotes around words  ;D

My personal opinion is summed up best by Sukrim's earlier post:


Just as there are people who will always buy their electronics from Best Buy, people who will always take their groceries through a checkout with a human being (instead of the self-checkouts) there are miners who will just point their rigs at their favorite pool and walk away, because it's easy and it doesn't require much intervention. Pool hopping requires additional effort, additional code and you have to check up on it often because pool ops like to play with miners, fake stats and sometimes your hopping code just plain breaks. There is certainly extra reward but it's not without extra effort and I'd hardly call it stealing from one store if I go elsewhere for a better deal.

See the various places where that has been explained. Pool hopping breaches the implied agreement of cooperation that the pool is based on.

Sure, under similar circumstances, yes.

That would be ethical under some circumstances and unethical under others, depending on the circumstances. For example, if he had an arrangement where he each miner got a share of the profits and he had joined a particular mine just as they had finished all the hard work to uncover a vein and left as soon as they had mined out that vein to join another mine that had also just found a vein, I would say that would be an ethical issue. Under those circumstances, there would likely be an implied agreement among the miners to share the good times and the bad, and it would be unethical to take a share of the profits of the hard work of others only to desert them as soon as more hard work was needed.

Well... now we're getting into agreements and contracts.  If we had them, i agree with you 100%, however, miners are under no obligations, implied or explicit.  If people swallow this hard fact, this conversation wouldn't come up I think...  Somehow there's this myth of an implied contract, most likely created by these discussions and eloquent arguments, but this is all personal feelings and thoughts, not real facts.  If this discussion is about feeling, then I suppose everyone could be right.  However, I have yet to see a single agreement when joining any pool out there.  No agreement/contract = total freedom to choose whatever you want with no consideration towards ethics.

I disagree.  This has nothing to do with an idea that there's an implied agreement.  What you are talking about is pool operators taking action against hopping.  It's the same as turning away a miner from some mine for whatever the reason.  but it has nothing to do with the idea of an implied agreement.  this is all semantics of course.  I clearly see your point, I simply differ on the logic.

To put it another way:  if a pool states:  "I agree not to use this pool for hopping" and a user agrees to this, then you have yourself an ethics problem if you use this pool for hoping.  As long as a pool has no such agreement, all these conversations are a bunch of "hot air".  Maybe pools should consider agreements and flat out ban hoppers.  It's their choice.

A person who is only interested in his own benefits, with disregard for established implied social obligations is also commonly known as a unethical scumbag ;)

If every single obligations or expectations in a community/group must be explicitly laid down before people should follow them, then we're all in for a very unpleasant life.

Remind me to shoot you first if we're ever on the same side in a war, it's bad enough to have other people shooting at me, worse when the guy next to me will start shooting me because the probability of the other side winning is higher. ;)

Whoever said the pools aren't against pool hopping is full of it.

Like someone said -- they only tolerate it because it's hard to know the difference between Mr. Honest Miner losing his net connection, and Mr. Scumbag pool hopping to chase a fresher block.

I'd also like to know -- all you pool hoppers -- what are your favorite pools? Which pools are the most amenable to pool-hopping?

You have got to be kidding me with your stupid shooting/war crap... idiot

Name calling is usually a sign that the argument struck home :)

You are correct if you actually stayed on the arguments and were sensible.  You must live under a rock (not a mining joke).  Why would you go into twilight zone with your nonsense when the news outta Oslo is disturbing enough?  Are you trying to get this forum or yourself on some gov agency to monitor or to dig into your life?  Common now... Totally inappropriate and irrelevant.  BTW, I do apologize for calling you an idiot.  I just couldn't think of anything else appropriate at that moment.

If it is well-known that pools take action against hopping, then there's an implied agreement not to hop. I don't see how you can have one without the other.

The elements on an implied agreement are that both sides know that the behavior is considered unacceptable when they enter into the agreement. For example, you know that Burger King doesn't want people to knock over their garbage cans, doesn't tolerate that behavior, and would kick you out if you did it. Therefore, when you enter Burger King knowing that, you have made an implied agreement not to knock over their garbage cans. You know they consider it a breach, and you still choose to enter.

Apology accepted and I believe I was and still am on topic man.

Whatever happened in Oslo has nothing to do with the topic here. I think you're letting your feelings over that affect your perception of this discussion. I live neither in Norway or the US, never been to either country so I doubt any of your government agencies would even remotely link whatever I say in a debate to any possible war event anywhere.

So shall we go back to your statement which I was pointing at as being fallacious?


This was the point I was using my example to address. Sorry if it touched a raw nerve due to whatever else might be affecting you but extreme examples usually show up the flaws in an argument better.

Your argument is that there is no agreement and implied obligations due to personal feelings/thoughts are mythical and should/can be disregarded. So only explicit contracts are acceptable, in the absence of which, miners/whoever/ is free to choose whatever with no consideration towards ethics.

My argument is that implied contracts exists and are accepted as a matter of daily life. We all make various decisions, some more than others, with other people's feelings and thoughts in mind. When we don't, usually people consider us at the lightest inconsiderate, selfish and at the other extreme end, possibly evil.

Hostage situation: bunch of strangers thrown together because they just happen to be in the wrong place at the same time. The implied social contract is for everybody to cooperate and do whatever they can to survive together. If somebody switches sides and tell the criminals "I'll work with you since I get more benefits that way", how would people view him? How many of us would do something like that? Why not, since there is no explicit contract.

Two brothers, again no explicit contract whatsoever, but how would people view a person who, for the sake of material benefits, repeatedly cheats on his brother or giving him the short end of the deals, only to come back smiling and cooperating whenever there's greater benefit to be gained?

Whenever two or more persons come together for a purpose, there is an implied contract. After all, would you partner me if I tell you that I'm going to fix it so that you do 70% of the work while I get 60% of the profits? The right and ethical thing is to be equally fair to everybody involved. Messy disagreements, fights, lawsuits and even wars come about because somebody decided he wants to be more fair to himself.

I think you are describing a law that deals with disturbing peace and possibly criminal damage to property...  it's beyond an implied agreement.

I like the BK analogy though, and here's a modification you might enjoy:
A person buys a hamburger in McDonalds, strolls in to BK with that McDonalds bag in hand, and asks for fries.  then goes across the street to Starbucks to eat both and maybe orders a cup of coffee there...  BK, McD and Sturbuks HATE to see this and some manager of Starbucks might actually ask you to leave... Is this ethical on either part?  You spent money at all places!

There are establishments that clearly state: no outside food or drink permitted.  Is it ethical to bring your own pop corn or say a bottle of water?

Pool operators should clearly state if they don't want pool hoppers and then discourage them (payout methods, banning etc...) if they want.

I don't think people who hop see it the way you present (BTW, personally, I don't disagree with you).  Hoppers do not believe they are entering an agreement.

Maybe yes, maybe no. But the big difference between these examples and pool hopping is that in these examples, you aren't harming other people. Pool hopping decreases other miner's average return per block.

Some stores have particular items at a deep discount. They hope that people will buy the more expensive items as well. In this case, there's no implied agreement not to buy only the discounted items -- the store takes the risk that smart shoppers will get a very good deal. But the smart shoppers don't hurt the other people shopping in the store, and the stores don't try to find and kick out the smart shoppers. A store is not a cooperative.

Sure they should. But that has nothing to do with the ethics of pool hopping. Primarily, pool hopping is unethical because it abuses the other miners.

I don't believe that. I think you are giving them an undeserved benefit of the doubt. I strongly suspect that they know perfectly well that they are entering into an implied agreement with the other miners. In any event, if they don't know that, it's likely due to their willful blindness, not the fact that no such agreement exists.

Long story short:
As long as there is no "(Please) don't pool hop this pool" sentence stated somewhere on the pool's webpage I don't care about delayed stats, faked round shares and whatnot and hop the pool.

I consider choosing which pool to mine at any point of time my personal right and I don't see any reason not to choose this on my own (especially as there are easy and simple countermeasures like PPLNS against pool hopping).

If anyone thinks him-/herself to be morally/ethically superior to me just because he/she mines at a loss in a pool with a payout system that is known to be broken for half a year already, well that's not my problem then. Haters gonna hate.

Comparing pool hopping with shooting comrades in a war, stealing or other things that are explicitly forbidden (or illegal) is highly inappropriate imho.

Pools offer a service to miners, not the other way round. Miners are free to choose their pool at any time. If some pools think they need to use a broken algorithm and enforce it with bans (meaning they steal from miners who subit 100% the same shares as anyone else, just not all the time!) that at least for me is reason enough to raise some red flags and I'm sure as hell gonna make my way out of there.
It's stupid enough that on most pools you have to open accounts with mail adresses and whatnot if all they really need is a payout address.

Pool hopping does NOT steal anything from/abuse other miners, 24/7 miners in proportional pools should know since february that pool hopping is possible, and some pools (like triplemining for example - they recently changed their payout model to a fair one btw!) even stated "no pool hopping protection" on their main page.

Sorry, but if you mine (which already is getting quite expensive/near unprofitable) and don't keep up with recent developments or read anything about mining (the forum here is full of pool hopping questions, countermeasures, complaints, hopping software...) that's your own personal problem then. If you decide to always mine somewhere because of some fancy stats that in the end cost you 20% of your income then that's YOUR choice.


All in all:
24/7 prop miner's stupidity is not my problem and I did already a lot (from advising pool owners on payout schemes to requesting more secure payout models at nearly every major pool and contributing code to an open source pool hopper to not let only a small elite hop - everyone here in this thread can start pool hopping in less than 5 minutes!) to make sure proportional payouts die out. Self proclaimed do-gooders can feel great about themselves and push their pool owners to put in even weirder restrictions (the next generation of pool hoppers won't need any webpage anymore but get stats most likely on protocol level) and shady measures/intransparency. I really hope that in a few months pool hopping will be dead, not because it's unethical or whatever, but just because no pool operator is stupid enough to open a proportional pool and no miner is stupid enough to mine in a prop. pool.

How about an argument of common sense.

If you explain pool-hopping to 90 non-pool-hopping miners, then point out 10 guys that are pool hopping, do you think there'd be hard feelings?

No, there'd be plenty of hard feelings, and for good reason.

Pools don't militate against "the 3% optimization", the "vectors" switch, overclocking, or any other legitimate way to increase hashrate.
But they certainly don't like pool hopping, because it goes against the idea of pools -- each man puts in X, and gets a proportionate amount of reward, based on how much he put in.

Pool hoppers want MORE than their fair share. Doesn't that pretty much define cheating?  I want to get an A+ without studying, so I write the multiplication table on my arm on the day of the test.

Everyone instinctively knows cheating when they see it.

If you think this method doesn't hurt the less-smart shoppers then you obviously haven't thought it through enough. For every PS3 that Best Buy sells at or near cost they're hoping to sell an extra controller, monster HDMI cable, etc. at steep markups. If they fail to make these kinds of sales then they make no profit and go out of business. In order to make up for the deal they offer me, they have to rape the next six customers in line - and that's not my choice or my fault, its the store's pricing policies to blame. You and I know not to buy the $80 HDMI cable, that's just silly, but the next guy behind us probably won't and you can't blame me for not hanging around Best Buy all day warning people off of them.

PPS is, depending on your goals, a broken payment scheme. Pools that use it have three options: 1. pick a different payment algorithm. 2. ban every pool hopper you see. 3. recognize that people will hop you and either embrace it or shrug it off. Anyone mining at such a pool without hopping is equivalent to the guy right behind me at Best Buy who's gonna buy that $80 cable and pay 600% markup on extra controllers. I'm not stealing their money by choosing to store-hop for different components, the store is stealing the money of those who don't know better.

If you (as a pool operator) make it known that you don't want to be hopped then I for one will not hop you. I know for a fact that it will not stop some of my colleagues and you should really choose one of the three options above (preferably #1 or #3 - #2 is unlikely to work well in the long run). If you choose to mine at a PPS pool, then either you know the risk and you're taking it anyway (I could get the controller cheaper, but I'm lazy and don't want to make another stop) or you don't know any better in which case I'm sorry to say you probably shouldn't be mining (I got this gold-plated plenum-sheathed nitrogen-injected HDMI cable for only $115 you guys!). Until someone builds an FPGA miner that you can plug in and press one button, mining is a game for the techies. If you don't know what you're doing your earnings will be sub-par, either from "stolen" mining dividends or from poor planning/configuration - just as they will in any industry.

Finally, hopping CAN actually do some good. If we wanted Best Buy to go out of business (or at least change their scammy business model) and we found out they were offering the PS3 at a loss, wouldn't it be in our best interest to collectively buy as many PS3s as possible? Sure they'll probably just rape their non-savvy customers that much harder but eventually they'll have to stop selling PS3s at a loss when normal customers won't pay the extra markup on other things. Can buying goods you know are sold at a loss be considered theft? If so, could the subsequent price-raise by the retailer you've "stolen" from be blamed on you or is it the retailer's fault?

These are muddy waters my friend, and anyone claiming a clear answer is either a liar or a fool.

Considering the amount and nature of PMs I get about pool hopping, at least half of these 90 miners would want to start to pool hop themselves... not start a fight. ::)

Also looking at the reaction of a LOT of smaller pools recently, which (in very often less than a week's time) switched payout models to hopping proof ones shows to me that luckily not everyone is fixed on that model that just came up because it was (and still is) used in deepbit.

I find that my bank's ATM is broken. When I press 4-7-2-1-0 it gives me 200$ in cash, no card needed. Now the error is in the ATM hardware, so to fix it my bank has to fix each and every ATM. It decides that letting me steal money off of the bank (and therefore the other customers) is cheaper than fixing all those ATMs.

Now these are my options:

• I can ask the bank nicely to reconsider.
• I can just use it for my own benefit.
• I can stop withdrawing money using the ATM bug. Others will still do it, but I don't. I am just being robbed, while the bank doesn't care.
• I can tell the media / as many people as I can to do it until the bank has to fix the bug or loose customers.

You are breaking a law by stealing money that you know is not yours.  Not a SINGLE pool has a posted rule against pool hopping, so not only isn't it illegal, but it doesn't violate a SINGLE pool's terms of service.

This wwould make sense if hoppers got paid while not doing ANY work.  I don't agree with your analogy.  it's not relevant.

exactly.

@ muyoso, CanaryInTheMine:

Wait, what? That was a pro mining argument...

doesn't additional hashing power in a pool "harm" existing miners anyways?  If so, then why not ban all additional power/users anyway?

is that why you see something like limit x per customer?
I'm sorry, but I've yet to hear ONE logical argument that proves that pool hopping is unethical.  I don't like it, but it doesn't mean it's unethical if pool's rules aren't violated.


They are doing what's best for them.  So what?  If the pool does not care about hoppers, where's the ethicality issue?
If the users of the pool, but not the pool owner have an issue, then they should pettition the owner to spell out the rules.  or they can switch pools.

Another thought, is this really about ethics or envy because someone decides to pool hop? Answer that honestly to yourself, not me.

Consider if everyone was to start pool hoping, do you still believe that this is an ethics issue or just growing pains of the bitcoin network?

I could read it either way, now that you mention it...
However, your example is about stealing and breaking the law... so whether it's pro or against, it's not a good one...

Anti-pool hoppers, I ask again, clearly delineate why pool hopping and only pool hopping is immoral/unethical/whatever.

Just say it's stealing isn't good enough. It's a mathematical algorithm implemented to maximize returns on shares submitted. Why is that different than say, finding a more efficient hashing method that boosts your hash/second? The same physical hardware is now returning more bitcoin at the expense of others. (I've heard that it doesn't contribute more "real work" so somehow that makes it less worthy, but that still isn't an ethical argument unless your ethos is that only work is ethical).

Or taken a look at another way, many people arguing against pool hopping engaged in coin hopping. When difficulty dropped and it was more profitable to mine namecoins you hopped over to those, raped the crap out of the difficulty and then hopped away when 2016 blocks were up, leaving a huge difficulty in your wake to be sorted out, effectively damaging namecoin and all those who support it. Why are you not immoral scumbags for doing that, when pool hoppers are? Because you did it manually instead of with a program? Over a longer time frame?

Specify what factors EXCLUSIVE to pool hopping are what make it unethical, and no more stupid analogies.

There are none.  They don't exist.  All these attempts at debating that it's unethical is a bunch bull feces.  If even a single universal and logical argument existed to prove that it's unethical, it would extend to every aspect of life and to do what's best for you would become unethical...  See the problem?  Then if it's unethical to better yourself, you would need to stop existing.  End of debate.

The whole point was that even in this example people would say that doing it was the right thing to do.


btw @ CanaryInTheMine:

Adding additional hashing power to a pool (constantly) reduces the time to find a block while leaving the (average) payout per share constant. Pool hopping however shifts average payouts from continous users to hoppers. Please don't get that mixed up. Also, I encourage you to get your math straight. There are still huge misconceptions about the principles governing pool hopping.

Also, at your latest post: there is so much wrong about this, I don't even know where to start. As an introduction you might want to check out http://www.justiceharvard.org/ (http://www.justiceharvard.org/).

@ bcpokey:

Coin hopping is essentially the same as pool hopping.

How can you post on page 6 of a meta discussion about pool hopping while not understanding the probabilistic principles of pool hopping?

(Emphasis added)

Therein is the difference. While people who only buy the discounted items may put pricing pressure on the merchant to raise prices on goods other people buy, it is the merchant that sets the prices. It is not just the merchant's scheme that pressures them to raise prices, but the merchants themselves who actually raise prices in response.

If pool hoppers only harmed other miners indirectly by forcing pool operators to change their payouts, it would be a completely different situation. But pool hoppers harm the other miners directly with no action on the part of the pool operators required.

You're right!  I did get that mixed up...  

As far as your link:  I am absolutely aware of it and what you are referring to, but doing what's best for you ethically vs. situations that present conundrums and paradoxes in a moral dilemma situations are different from ethics.  Morals and ethics sometimes are used interchangeably, but these concepts are not the same thing.

Deciding to pool hop (without violating pool's rules) is not the same as starving to death and stealing food (unethical?) to survive if no other option exists (but not immoral) for example...

Side note: if you are starving to death because you can't take your eyes of your mining operation, well, then you need a shrink.  not a morals lecture.

Getting into mining is essentially deciding to do some work.  this would be the construct or the realm under which ethics and morals could be explored regarding bitcoin.  it's hard to come up with a dilemma arising within bitcoin mining because you can always stop mining.  
You can not stop starving out of free will in certain situations (like where you absolutely can not obtain food ethically).  I can not come up with any situations where you could absolutely not stop mining.

But this is way off topic...

There's a story in the Bible about an owner of a vineyard hiring workers at different times of the day and the wage they receive.  Now, this is the closest example I can think of that is "old" in terms of time.  Mentioning it here, is not to offend those who will twitch at the mere mention of the word Bible, it is just that, a VERY OLD example of a similar situation.  If you have other examples from other books and/or religions, please share and DO NOT concentrate on the Bible reference and get offended, that's not my intent.  But if you Google the story and read a synopsis by your favorite philosopher/atheist/priest/whatever you might be surprised how close the issues are.

Bottom line is that the owner sets the rules.  no rules = wild west

The point of that story was that none of the workers benefited at the expense of the others and therefore they had no right to complain. A pool hopper does benefit at the expense of other miners.

Yes, the story of the laborers in the vineyard was about how the workers who worked longer (all day long) were envious because those who worked only 1 hour got the same unit of pay.

But that extra pay was from the vineyard owner's generosity -- that was the point. "Are you envious, because I am generous?"

The extra pay did NOT come from the other laborers, or they would have been an injustice committed, and they would have had every reason to complain.

Yep. Change the story a little bit:

A vineyard owner needs some vines cleared out. He asks some guys if they'd like the job. They ask how much it pays. The owner says, "I'm willing to pay $30 to get it done." The two guys agree to do the job. A few hours later, the owner decides he wants the job done faster, so he adds a third guy to the team, and then insists that the two guys who originally agreed to do the work accept $10 each, even though they did more than 1/3 of the $30 job.

Now that the person getting paid the same but working less has his bonus coming right out of the other guys paychecks, it seems a bit different, doesn't it?

But the all day workers were complaining....  aren't non-hoppers complaining too here?
The owner sets the rules is my takeaway from it.  Let the pools set the rules.

The pools do set the rules between the pool and each individual miner. But that has nothing to do with whether there is or isn't an implied agreement between miners in the same pool. (See my example rebutting the vineyard workers example.)

Except that the pool's payout scheme is known 100% and not changed at the end of a round.

I've been explaining pool hopping on multiple threads, bragging of my efficiencies, telling miners at pool threads that they're losing out because I'm pool hopping. I've tried really hard (in some cases successfully) to get full time miners to get their pools to change.

I've helped pools change and for brand new prop pools pointed out the importance of not being on prop because it will cost full time miners. I've posted this on their public threads where all their miners can read it.

If someone reads a post like that from me and doesn't care, then he is giving tacit but knowing approval for pool hopping.

What is the implied agreement here?  I bet you for every miner you will have another version.  If 100% of pool users don't agree with it, then there is no such agreement.  only what is present here, debates about it.  As opposed to a pool operator creating an agreement for all to abide by...

OMG!!! Are they implicitly agreeing to let you pool-hop? Well then, you have got youself an implied agreement!!
Oh wait, that's circular, isn't it? Crap... Opps...

This is wrong.


@ organofcorti:

Yes, yes, here's your absolution already. Now feel better.


Also, there are no implied agreements.

sorry not getting the circularity.

1. I'm telling them I hop.
2. I'm telling them it costs them if I hop.
3. I suggest they tell the pool to be hopper proof.
4. They don't do anything about it.

If there are no rules against it and if full time miners don't mind what I do after explaining the situation to them, then how can what I do be unethical.

I hope I've explained it better this time, and less circularly.

edit: Thanks bb. I always did want to be absolute. And circular, i guess.

Was being a bit sarcastic.  
Making fun of this mystical implied agreement out there: one "against" pool hopping and you obtaining one "for" pool hopping.

I read something about this but didn't get it.  Each individual miner or even calculation has the exact same probability of forming a block as anyone else's.  There is no progress either.  How would switching to a different pool help?  You can't just jump in and say oh well my pool just finished so I'm gonna get on this one cuz it's close to being done.  It doesn't work like that.  Where's the math to back this up as being advantageous?

Here's one link. I'll leave it to you to find the rest.

https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=3165.0 (https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=3165.0)

The implied agreement is, as it always is, that all miners will interact in good faith with each other and deal fairly with each other. This is understood to be an implied portion of any agreement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_covenant_of_good_faith_and_fair_dealing

Show me someone who understands what pool hopping is who insists that it consists of interacting fairly with the other miners and contributing in good faith to their cooperative effort and I'll show you a liar.

If the pool pays out based on the number of shares accumulated prior to finding a block, once the pool has accumulated a certain number of shares towards finding a block without finding one, a pool hopper can be sure that any additional share he submits before the pool finds a block will yield him a below-average payout.

/fixed

Some are stupid enough to stay in the pool though and then complain that others aren't.

Do you feel like crap after pool hopping?
Do you feel an evil joy from pool hopping?
Do you feel cheated, my dear honest miner?
Do you feel like your pool got abused (or did you do some selfabusing in the pool... oops)?

No problem my dear friend, let me fix that for you!

Transfer some coin to: 1Kae8NWf1pKsadDu53E9GeRo6pN9c4hrgy and you will feel better. Instantly!
 
PS! If you do not feel better after the transfer, you did not transfer enough bitcoins. Transfer more and see what happens.

BTW, think happy thoughts while you send me your bitcoin!  :-*

Why? because eskimo bob came up with a way to try to deduct funds from addresses first?

Pooled mining is an agreement among miners to jointly work on finding blocks and splitting the rewards in proportion to the contribution of each, with the pool operator as middleman. Pool-hopping is an attempt to gain more than the fair share of a pool's rewards for the work done, breaching the agreement, and as such is unethical.

The claim that "people were warned and still mine for proportional pools, so they consent to it" is understandable, but problematic because:
1. Not everyone reads the forum. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the users of Deepbit have never looked at its forum thread. You are taking advantage of those users who don't know any better.
2. Pool-hopping is hard enough to understand as it is. I think there is virtually nobody who has commented about the statistical properties of mining and isn't guilty of having made an error at some point. Add to it the people who actively deny that it works or is harmful to honest miners (rarer these days) and the FUD against hopping-proof methods, and an average miner doesn't know if to believe Random Internet User A or Random Internet User B. It is clear that anyone would avoid proportional pools if he had a good understanding of pool-hopping and the alternatives, so staying with the pool should not be seen as consent to pool-hopping.

However.

It is clear that the real problem is not with the hoppers, but with the pool operators who allow this to happen and deceive their customers. Abstaining from hopping will not solve the problem, as there will always be those won't even be bothered by the question of whether this is ethical, and silently eat at the due rewards of miners.

The only way to expose the corrupt proportional pools for what they really are is to openly mount a massive pool-hopping attack, demonstrating a statistically significant drop in the payouts of honest miners. One would hope that this will create an outcry leaving operators with no other choice than to back down and adopt an unbroken scoring method (such as PPLNS). To the extent that openly pool-hopping helps bring about this brighter future, I would say that it is acceptable.

In my opinion, the near-perfect analogy to pool-hopping is a game of poker where some people know the odds and the others don't. The ones with the knowledge (who put it to use) have a clear advantage.

Similarly, in both cases, the more people maximize their expected value by playing the odds optimally, the less there is to win. Ultimately, if everyone pool-hopped, the PPS pools would simply halt and the EV would drop to 0.

Proportional. PPS is something else entirely.

So it's not like Poker at all. You can still play poker if everyone knows the odds, you can't mine in prop if everyone hops.

@Meni & Mikes: Agreed, I see openly pool hopping as a form of hacktivism. If we could get rid of bad ideas 100% of the time by simply talking about them I'd be all for it, but some folks won't listen to words and actions speak louder. If other miners at a pool feel any pain from my actions they should take their complaints to the pool operator who should have been using a fair system in the first place. If they don't feel any pain then they either aren't affected by my actions in a meaningful way or else have no comprehension whatsoever about how mining works and should perhaps pick another business.

Saying hopping is unfair to those who stick with one pool is like saying that arbitrage is unfair to those who stick with one exchange. If you don't like it, there are certainly ways to close the loophole and you'd be better served complaining to those with the power to do so than going after the arbitrageur. Mining is a business and you are all my competitors. If Target found a way to profit 20% more in a way that would possibly hurt Wal Mart's profits, would it be unethical to do so? I think you're all confusing personal ethics, social ethics and business ethics.

Arbitrage trading actually helps consolidate markets.

Oops.


The mining halting is really the function of the optimal hopping strategy. In poker playing the perfect strategy is close to impossible, but if everyone did, the situation would be close - everyone would win and lose the same on average.

alright, I read the info and I think this is a myth.  The first strategy is to mine until 43.5% then hop off the pool and solo mine?

At the current difficulty, you have a 0.001239% (rounded) probability of finding a block within 10 minutes at 300 MH/s.  So basically you're wasting time that you could have spend contributing to the pool and getting a higher split.  Then if you beat the pool and find the block solo, you get 50 BTC but lose all the progress in the current pool.  And that's like betting on red and black at the roulette table except if the payments were less than your bet.  One is going to lose and you're betting your mining time on opposites.  If you thought you could beat the pool solo, you should solo the entire time.

The same goes for mining until 43.5% of what I assume is the estimated completion time of a block since there is no "progress" or "completion percentage."  You bet on two pools, only one can win, you're losing your mining time on whatever pool loses.  It doesn't seem logical.

You're wrong, but thanks for proving my point about the existing confusion.

Tell me this. Let's say the proportional pool has (2*difficulty) shares in the current round. If you mine for it now, then no matter what happens, you will get less than (Block reward)/(2*difficulty) per share you submit. So why do it instead of, say, a PPS pool which gives you (Block reward)/(1.1*difficulty) per share you submit?

Have you read the math behind it and are disagreeing, or are you just saying that it doesn't "feel" right? If you have a problem with the math, point out the error in the proofs or formulate a proof that it doesn't work. If it's feel alone, well, you can either try it empirically or ignore it.

It "seems logical" to me, in fact I had considered such a thing way back when deepbit and slush were basically it for pools, when I noticed that on some rounds the amount of time I spent mining a block on deepbit would have given me more profit on PPS than prop, but on quick rounds prop was a much higher yield, and so if I could simply run a script that automatically dropped me over from one scheme to the next based on some calculation I could come out with more coin than normal on average. Obviously not possible directly due to delayed stats, but pool hopping I gather is essentially the extension of my idea to the modern system with multiple pools. You make a big return on short rounds, so if you hop around on average you will come out slightly ahead.

EDIT: Sniped by meni.

I still don't consider this unethical, for where do you draw the line? For example, BTCGuild is currently in a 24 hour slump, with a -40% expected return. Am I bound to forever mine on BTCGuild, because I have some hash there and there is some unwritten unspoken implied agreement? Or if I see that the pool is having a poor run, am I allowed to move over to say deepbit, and when BTCGUild starts to do better move back? Where are you drawing the line? 24hours? 12hours? 6? 2? 1? What is the distinction between being efficient and unethical? Do I have to wait until a block is completed on a pool to leave that pool then wait til a block is completed on the new pool to join? To me there is no agreement other than what has been written in the rules of proportional payout, and pool hopping is merely the extreme extension of following the luck.
I've seen no response to the question of coin hopping either in regards to namecoin, which is a near-perfect analogy of poolhopping which many anti-poolhoppers participated in.

I still don't do it (except namecoin hopping), but I see no problem with it.

Not at all. People playing poker all know that they are competing with each other, that their interests are averse to each other, and that each one must protect themselves form being taken advantage of by the other. The expectation of good faith and fair dealing certainly doesn't include ignorance about the odds of the game. That is nothing like a mining pool where many miners believe their interests are aligned.

But there is nothing like that in poker. The games works better when everyone knows the odds.

since it's really super late at night and I had to go to work earlier before finishing most of those documents/explanations/proofs, is the basic theory that the difference in pool profitabilities mind-block is based on the drop or gain in that particular pool during that process of finding a block?  Cuz that would sort of make sense.

EDIT: well I got curious and read more of it and kinda get it now but the theory doesn't seem to hold water even now.  Any given moment in time results in an equal chance of anyone finding a block weighted by H/s.  So your payout proportionate to everyone else's is lower if you all started at the same time or started slightly later.  So if you all start at once and you've been going for a long time and you decide it's just not going well for that pool in that round, you jump to another pool which hasn't been processing for as long and have an equal chance of getting the block but for a higher reward.

...but every single pool starts processing a new block at the exact same time since everyone's working on the same chain and everyone knows when blocks are completed.  And if there "is no progress" then a smaller pool wouldn't be "farther" from creating a block and there would be no point in pool hopping.

Please stop being delusional or claiming pool hopping doesn't work without posting a mathematical proof or at least a well thought through example. This thread is about something different that if pool hopping works or not (a hint: if it didn't work at all, why would some people here be so upset about the whole thing?).

Just to get the thread back on track, if I pm you my hopping efficiencies for the month will you believe? And then go on from there? This is exactly the sort of thing I was talking about. If this guy doesn't care if I hop even after being told it will lose him coins, then how can it be unethical to hop?

hmm.
i keep a program running on my 2nd monitor, telling me how many shares that particular pool has done. i can tell you, not all pools starts processing a new block at the same time..
sometimes, it can look very tempting to jump to a pool when they start a new block, but when the pool has a track record of finishing a block for an extended time...i might or might not jump to it...or just jump a partial of my hashpower.

i can't really say exactly how much i gained, but it's pretty damn good. no more getting pissed off because of one block takes 1.5 day, and only get 0.3btc

This is exactly the sort of thing I was talking about. This guy is ignorant about the consequences of pool-hopping, and we should educate him, not take advantage of him. But I agree that we've tried talking and it didn't work, so it's the time to educate by action.

This is (the reverse of) the gambler's fallacy. Unless there's something wrong with how a pool is run, a track record of longer than expected blocks has no bearing whatsoever on the length of future rounds.

um, jumping to pools with low hashing power rarely benefits me.
it's either i'm doing it for shit & giggles, or i forgot to turn off autopilot, and it hops into the smaller pool.
they're barely profitable anyways..except for eligius. they're not too bad if your hopper jumps there.

if there is no rule banning hopping...

you go into a pool with the expectation of getting 50x (your shares/total shares) which is what you get and what hoppers get.

No on actually steals anything from anyone, they get 50x their shares/total shares just like anyone else.

If they dont like their resulting rewards, they can looks at different payout styles and I'm sure some people do try various pools and various payout styles to maximize their resulting rewards.

Everyone is following the rules... (as long as hopping isnt banned).. .

Everyone is getting paid by the rules as expected..

you are not getting 40x (your shares/total shares) while the hopper is getting 50(his shares/total shares) plus 10 (you shares/total shares). it just aint happening.

Every game has rules, some people have better strategies than me, when playing risk, some people use odds charts when playing texas holdem, as long as you are following the rules, there is nothing unethical about it at all. People just feel like it is wrong, they dont like to see others make more than them. I could feel like I should win risk texas holdem 50% of the time, but if I play the guy using the odds chart i will probably win a lot less. I can get mad, but if he didnt break the rules, then he didnt break the rules

or like them cars you make at boy scouts.. everyone puts the weight on the back, someone finds out that if you put the weight on front, he goes faster nd wins every time. the other kids can be upset that he used the same tools and same parts  and yet is going 20% faster in every race but the fact is he is still following the rules, if not tradition.


you assume people join a pool for aligned interests? and not to reduce their personal variance and get more frequent payouts? People arent aligned they are utilizing each others powers to make money right now. You see it all the tme "WHY DIDN'T I MINE SOLO" people upset they found a block and had to share it with teh pool. DOES THAT SOUND LIKE ALIGNED INTERESTS? It isnt. People arent in it for some kind of global effort, no they still want their BTC. Otherwise they would mine and donate it all back to the pool

If you count all shares across different rounds together, then this is definitely what's happening, you get 40 x (your shares/total shares) while the hopper gets 60 x (his shares/total shares)

And with the expectation that this arrangement will lead to the same ratio when calculated for pool work in total, not just within rounds. Just because people are ignorant and don't understand that you're scamming them doesn't mean it's ok.

"Aligned interests" means your interests (of obtaining a steady income, say) are aligned with those of others (that is, there are scenarios where the satisfaction of everyone's interests are improved). It has nothing to do with altruism.

Your peers in the pool are your business partners, you've entered a mutually beneficial agreement to reduce everyone's variance. By hopping you are defrauding your partners of their due reward.

Umm, that's exactly what happens when someone pool hops. The pool hopper gets an above-average return for his shares and everyone who sticks with the pool gets a below-average return. Without the pool hopper, everyone gets more or less the same return per share.

If deepbit is half the network, average round length is 20 minutes. So when a round starts (if a block is found from an unknown source, it's probably deepbit), you stick around for 8 minutes which is plenty.

You don't hop one pool, you hop between all proportional pools simultaneously.

Those who earn x2 or so of the normal income will disagree that it's irrelevant.

You always mine for the pool with the lowest number of shares in the current round. If all pools have >43.5%*difficulty you mine in a fair pool or solo. This is all done automatically of course, using something like the python pool hopping proxy.

You've still not addressed my question, you say that I've entered an agreement with business partners when I mine on a pool. But no one has made clear the parameters of that supposed agreement (other than what is laiad out in proportional payment structure)? When am I allowed to back out? When can I switch? Once I enter into this so called agreement am I bound to it forever? Can I never change my mind?

The problem with "implied agreements" is that there is no clear basis to them. Your side of the agreement is not the same as mine unless we explicitly state it as so. If I can switch pools after 24 hours, why not 12, or 6, or as often as I want? Where is the line, how are you defining it?

Just because something increases your personal gain and is complicated does not make it inherently unethical. Everything you do in bitcoin to enhance your stake diminshes someone elses. Hopping isn't stopping anyone else from doing anything, it is not some secret ploy, does not rely on deception or coercion or any other inherently unethical practice.

I don't think there's a "line", there are various courses of action each with its own degree of "unethicalness". But I think that if you start mining for a pool with the intention of obtaining payouts in proportion to the contribution, and then for whatever reason you decide the pool is not for you, you're free to go. The problem starts when the reason you joined the pool in the first place is to obtain a payout greater than your contribution. Clearly if you use hopping software to hop dozens of times a day then this is your intention.

As for the namecoin hopping, a major difference is the lack of a reference "fair" reward. For pooled mining as a phenomenon in the larger Bitcoin mining world, it is clear that the fair payout per share is pB, and that any amount above it is freeloading (remembering that every share submitted to a pool ultimately translates to increased security of the Bitcoin network). But Namecoin and Bitcoin between them are not part of a larger context which defines what the fair payout is. Furthermore, a decrease in a blockchain's difficulty generally means that its security is lesser now, and hence adding capacity to it is more beneficial. So it is acceptable for market forces to drive capacity to where it's most valuable.

...While creating value. Buying Bitcoins leaves the other party with dollars which he finds more valuable than Bitcoins, and buying mining rigs increases Bitcoin's security.

It relies on taking advantage of people who don't know any better. But as I said it's not black and white, and hopping is acceptable if it is accompanied by genuine attempts to educate the public.

ಠ_ಠ

i normally hop only 1-2 pool, and it's more than enough.
with my current hashrate, hopping away from deepbit only cost me tiny fraction of work there, but can gain huge profit elsewhere. just gotta time it properly.

you have the time to do this manually? why not use a proxy? The python proxy Meni refers to is easy to set up and manage, and as he mentioned 200% of normal coinage certainly helps stay in the difficulty and electricity cost increases.

i am using a proxy, but i'm controlling the proxy on where to hop.

like i said, i keep the proxy running to monitor other pools, and if i deem it's profitable to hop, i'll hop. i'm not too keen on hopping after the pool reached more than 1mil share...i'd rather wait until they start again.
Last night i fell asleep while hopping via proxy, forgot to switch it, and i only got 0.1btc for 6 hours of work. bleh.

This is completely out in the open.  No one is taking advantage of anyone else.  There's no misleading.  Only inaction on the part of those who do not hop and pool operators who choose to allow it.  What is the non-hopper's issue?  Inability to setup pool hoping?  That's their problem, no the pool hoppers.  What is the pool operator's issue?  To the operator, with all due respect, it's irrelevant from a technical or operational standpoint.  Keeping their pool's users who don't hop and don't like the idea happy is another matter and solely the operator's responsibility as it is up to the operator to act upon this issue or not.

Make the rules.  No rule = wild west. anything goes.

You miss the entire point of implied agreements. We don't want to spend twenty minutes negotiating to buy a candy bar, and that level of precise detail is not needed. All that is necessary is that you interact with others in good faith and deal with them fairly. That is the implied agreement.

The line is between acting in good faith and acting in bad faith. If you want to change pools because you don't like the pool, want to try another pool, or something like that, you entered and exited the pool in good faith. There's no problem. If you left the pool because you want to shift a disproportionate share of the work to the other miners, only to re-enter it when you claim a disproportionate share of the profit, that's bad faith. That's abusing the system to get a share greater than your fair share at the expense of your fellow miners.

Of course not. It's when you deal with others in bad faith and deal with them unfairly that you are acting unethically.

No. That's not true.

Entering a profit-making cooperative with others when times are good, taking a disproportionate share of the profit earned by the work of others, only to desert the cooperative as soon as hard work is necessary to make more profit, with the intent of re-joining the cooperative as soon as the hard work is done in time to get another disproportionate share of the profit is an inherently unethical practice.

the question is: is it really worth it ?

to keep disconnecting and connecting your miners ? and how much % gain you get ? compared let us say to the normal proposed daily gain by bitcoin calc ?
http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php

and nope it is not ethical and i do not do it.

just asking the right question to see how mean the human being can get. for like 20%+ or 50%+ or 1.5%+ they can get mean and hop like rabbits :D!!

So you say it's unethical even if the hoppers don't come out ahead because of the reconnect/disconnect overhead? Pls expl.

"Bad faith" or for hopping to be unethical requires intentional deceit and/or pretending (to follow stated rules for ex.).  So, if a pool has no stated policy/rule regarding hopping, the hopper is maximizing what they can get.  it's not bad faith or unethical.  the hoppers state what they do and apparently some pools don't care.  If the pool users have an issue, they should take it up with the pool's operator or join another pool.

Candy bar is an awful example. There is no implied contract, there is an explicitly defined contract. You pay me XXX dollars for YYY candy bars (in the united states). You don't like that agreement then you don't get them. Price is stated, non-negotiable, you agree or you move on. In fact, that is how almost all things in life are, explicit, not implicit. Maybe the agreement isn't written formally "You must take $$$ out of your wallet and put it in my hand" but that's not at all relevant or related to the conversation. There is no statement of any kind as to any actions on my part other than submitting a share and the reward I will receive for doing so.

Additionally you guys are arguing an invalid point. You are not gaining "more than your fair share", in fact you are taking precisely the share assigned to you by propositional payout. That's why people argue against prop payout. While on a global level you may get a higher return due to playing the odds, you are not "stealing" anything that would not have been taken otherwise were you sitting around that pool anyway.

Yes it is actually. That's what zero-sum means.

While you may not like "fair weather friends" that doesn't make them "unethical". Makes them unlikable. Meni's argument is the closest one to being plausible, as to taking advantage of the unknowledgable. However the information is freely available, people are trying to make it known as best they can. The other arguments are just crybaby talk really.

What if the candy bar is defective? What if the merchant knows the candy bar is stale? What if the customer eats the candy bar before paying and then the merchant says that candy bar is $100?

And in the typical case, there is barely any explicit agreement. You put the candy bar on the counter, implying that you wish to buy it. The merchant states a price, implying that this is what he will accept in exchange for the candy bar. You give the merchant money, implying that this is in exchange for the candy bar at the stated price. The merchant gives you change, implying he has accepted the difference in exchange for the candy bar. 99% of the agreement is implied and flows from custom and circumstance.

What if the candy bar is defective?  Ummmm, I guess you just puke it out then, call the manufacturer and ask for an RMA... 

and merchants don't say 100 bucks cause you ate it.... they will happily scan that wrapper and ask you for for the terminal says.

This is all hyperbole and pure esoteric speculation regarding what if candy is this or that and blah blah blah... la-la land.

OK, I'm confused. I'd like to pin point the ethical problem here.

So, an example: If no one knew pool hopping provided a bonus for hoppers and no one ever realised it, would it be unethical?

If the pool hopper wasn't doing it intentionally or didn't realize they were taking advantage of the other miners, then they would still be acting in good faith and intending to deal honestly with the other miners. So they wouldn't be breaching the implied contract. But people's self-serving and stubborn insistence that they don't see anything wrong with it isn't convincing. People are very good at convincing themselves that something is true if it benefits them to believe it.

Ignorance is not an excuse...  If you go somewhere and you are unfamiliar with their specific driving rules (regardless of how fair they are) and you break one, while you think you were acting in good faith (and you probably were), the cop will still give you a ticket.

OK. So if the hopper doesn't think there's a problem but the full time miners *do* have a problem with it, is it then unethical? (I'm not trying to be a smart arse, just trying to find the parameters for this discussion.)



We're talking ethics here not law.

fine, i'll take the bait.

200% 150% increase in output.

is it worth it?
what do you think?

Has nobody brought up the pools which explicitly state "pool hoppers welcome here"?

I think if there are uninformed full time miners at pools that explicitly welcome hoppers, then the pool takes the hit on ethics and not the hopper.

The only pool I know to say this, is one that thinks they're using a hopping-proof method and falsely represents themselves as such, making this irrelevant (and for pools which are truly hopping-proof, the statement "hoppers welcome" is technically true but meaningless). Is there a proportional pool which says hoppers are welcome? If so I guess it's ok to hop them.

The same is true here. Here the specific charge is acting in bad faith, so good faith is obviously a defense just as not speeding would be a defense to a charge of speeding. But not knowing that acting in bad faith was prohibited by an implied covenant is not a defense, just as not knowing speeding is illegal is not a defense.

It's not quite that simple. If the hopper doesn't think there's a problem, and that belief is objectively reasonable in light of the information he knows or should know, then his conduct is not unethical. We rightfully cast a skeptical eye on those who are informed that their conduct is unethical and somehow manage to form an apparently sincere belief that we are wrong. (And, per my post above, bad faith is sufficient -- it doesn't matter whether they knew that an implied agreement prohibited them from acting in bad faith.)

For example, in United States v. Cheek and Cheek v. United States, Cheek was charged with willfully failing to file a tax return. His defense was that he didn't believe he was really required to pay income tax. The judge disallowed his defense (ignorance of the law is no excuse). His conviction was overturned because to willfully fail to file income tax returns, you must know that you have a duty to file them. However, he was retried and convicted. The jury was not impressed with his arguments that he didn't believe he was required to pay income taxes because the 16th amendment wasn't properly ratified or whatever crazy argument he made. The jury felt that he was just lying about his beliefs, just like pool hoppers are.

If a pool specifically says they welcome pool hoppers, then the only possible issue that I can see would be miners who don't understand the implications of that. But I think it's fair to say that they have an obligation to investigate that and decide if that's the pool for them. A pool owner doesn't have an obligation to educate his miners about the implications of his policies, just to tell them what they are.

Well, if I was a rational new pool operator, I would welcome hoppers at least until I get my pool hash rate up to a certain level where they become a problem for the majority than being the majority themselves.

I think pool hopping is not unethical, it's rational. If the pool operators offer me a profit by switching between them....why not take that advantage?
Blaming the hoppers is like blaming everyone who knows how to set off something against tax liability properly.

It's up to the pool operators to declare their pool as hopper friendly or not. It's up to them to take action against or for it. The users can choose the pool the suites them best. There are so many pools out there, i doubt that hopping is a problem at all. Are there any reliable statistics about how many pool hoppers there are and how many "loss" they have caused?

It's rational in the sense that you benefit from it. If you would benefit from killing your mother and could get it away with it, would it be rational to kill her?

The same reason you don't steal from people just because they make it easy for you to do so.

Except those that set off against tax liability properly don't enter into agreements with other people in bad faith.

Sure, if a pool declares they're hopper friendly, then there's no issue. If a pool says hoppers are prohibited, I hope you agree that it's unethical to hop. That leaves the issue where the pool operator doesn't make such a declaration, which was the case most people were discussing.

So you agree then that if a pool operator doesn't take action for or against pool hopping, they are breaching the implied agreement with their miners? If not, then what does it mean to say it's up to them?

That's not relevant. It's wrong to steal even if you're stealing from someone who can tolerate the loss and doesn't have many people stealing from them. Sure, if a bank has a lot of people stealing from them, they'll probably wind up offering sucky rates and service and customers will leave them. That doesn't justify stealing from a bank.

The transparently self-serving arguments pool hoppers use to rationalize their behavior is obvious. Make those same arguments about anything else and they're laughable.

Yeah, like killing someone is in any way comparable to pool hopping. :D Compare apples to oranges.

With pool hopping you don't take anything out of someones personal wallet. Hoppers and Non-hoppers do not possess anything before the payout round of the pool. It's a competition to get the biggest slice of the cake and not from someones personal pocket. You take an offer the pool operator gives you.

If hopping is prohibited by the pool's TOS, it's a TOS breach and therefore stealing. If it's not in their TOS it's rational to take the advantage.

"implied agreements" are as the name says implied and therefore subjective. If the pool operator explicitly points out that pool hopping is not allowed, then pool hopping is of course an agreement breach.

It is relevant. The users are what makes a pool strong, "the force" is on their side. If you don't like pools that allow pool hopping, then don't use them. Join a pool that suites you best, show your protest by joining a pool that actively fights pool hopping.

The point was to show that the form of your argument is invalid. Showing that something benefits you and that you can get away with it doesn't show that it's rational to do it.

Pool hoppers see it as a competition to get the most from the cake. Other miners believe that it's a cooperative. That's the problem. If everyone understands it's a competition, that's fine. But otherwise, you expect that the guys on the same team as you are playing for the team, not themselves.

If you're going to repeat a refuted argument, you should first address the refutation. Showing that you can get away with something and also that you benefit from it doesn't show that it's rational if it's unethical. If you could kill your mom and benefit from it, would it be rational to do it? If you could cheat your business partner out of $5,000 and get away with it, is it rational to do it?

Don't hate the player, hate the game.  8)

It really all depends on the point of view you take. It's not "getting away with something" if you haven't done anything wrong. What's wrong/right in this case is obviously subjective. A discussion is pointless... you won't convince me and i wont convince you.
The pool "market" (to not say competition again ;) ) will regulate itself. Join the pool of your choice but don't blame operators who don't want to take action against pool hoppers.

i'm out, flame on.  :)

I don't mind hoppers..It's always personal choice..

Btw..is there any good Windows Hopping Sftw?

would yall hate hoppers less, if when yall got a really big block.. we hopped back and helped yall finish.. that is when we have nothing better to do?

right now the standard is to hop to a favorite backup pool, when none of the pool they monitor have found a block recently. There is a discussion about instead of going to the back up, hopping to the site with the most shares.. ie the people who havent found a block in the longest time


yeah i know we still suck..but would we suck less?

This is exactly how I feel. I really like triplemining but cannot afford to spend 160 hours for approx. .4 bitcoins.  I would be willing to forgo the the work I put in to ensure a quicker profit elsewhere.  The time I spent mining there is considered a sunk cost.  More money (time in this case) should not be invested based on time or money already spent on the project.  Fortunately I switched over to a different pool and have recouped some of the losses.  It would have been foolish to remain at triple while the hashrate continued to fall making it even more difficult to find a block.  Say I throw money down the toilet and then decide to stop one day and save it, I bet almost everyone would say I was smart, not unethical.

I think most non-hoppers won't have problems with situations like that. Giving up after hanging on significantly beyond the point of maximum profits is not the same as intentionally setting up to hop the moment it's more profitable.

Bithopping increases difficulty.
So it does work for you for a short period...

Can you please provide an explanation? Sounds interesting but ... unlikely.

This is exactly the same as intentionally setting up to hop. People automating the hopping process is just wasting less time, why is it morally/ethically more acceptable to you to do the same thing yet less efficient ?

Anyone leaving, wether at 43% or at 150% is causing the same effect of shrinking a pools hashrate, the whole argument regarding poolhopping was related to honest(lol) miners sticking with pools through good and bad times yet you accept that its fair that users effectively poolhop manually when they choose to based on their own perception of what their mining time is worth.

The intention is what makes things different.

Somebody thinking "I'm only going to do this for as long as it's more profitable than other options" at the START, is different from another person who keeps trying until the real costs (not just the potential loss of profits) of doing is unacceptable.

It's the same difference between somebody who deliberately goes out and run down a pedestrian and somebody who accidentally runs over an pedestrian. Similar end result but the initial intentions (or lackof) make them ethically very different.

Accidentally running down a pedastrian would suggest that the person would accidentally quit the long running block on one pool and join a new pool.

Ive never seen anyone so clueless to not knowingly leave a pool and knowingly join a new pool.

Nothing is accidental here, software hopping or manual hopping is the same thing except software hopping is more efficient.

Sorry if the original example was not sufficiently close to hopping for you to see the point about original intentions,

A man who starts by planning to kill a person if the person does not cooperate within 41 minutes, would usually be considered as committing murder or whatever is the equivalent crime in your country. He planned to kill (or hop in our case) right from start.

A man who did not have the original intention to kill a person but does so after getting frustrated and angry from pleading and arguing for 4 hours, would usually be considered for manslaughter or whatever is the equivalent crime in your country. He did not plan to kill (or hop) right at the start.

Again you are changing the overall situation to fit your own moral compass.

If you want to call something right or wrong, you simply cant go and cherry pick which situation is acceptable and then which isnt. It comes down to the same thing, even if the one gives you less of an edge. Its still an edge, and the long block pool is still losing a user who decided that hes not going to stay till the end.

If I decide to make that decision of leaving at 10% 20% 40% 50% 100% 300% or whatever percent, it was my choice not to stay with the pool for the full duration no matter how you try and sugar coat it.

I understand what point you are trying to make but it remains cherry picking the situation to fit your own "moral" compass.

Even by your own example, both people, premeditated or out of anger, would go to jail. The second case wont simply be excused and given slap on the wrist, its still a crime.

So far you seem to want to make a case that the person leaving because he got angry and dont want to waste more money mining for less value is doing it as his given right and doesnt do anything wrong. Guess what, people planning to leave at 43% is also doing it as their given right.

I'm not changing the overall situation. The world isn't just black and white. There are many ways to arrive at the same outcome: be it leaving a pool or getting somebody killed. But the outcome alone isn't enough to make a judgement. Otherwise, they won't be need for trials: we'll all just pin the same punishment on whoever for whatever, nevermind what exactly happened.



Again, I'm not cherry picking any situation. It remains consistent regardless of what the action may be: The intentions matter in judging it.



Sorry, I guess it was still a bad example because I didn't know first degree murder and manslaughter gets the same punishment in your country. That would make it difficult to comprehend what I was trying to illustrate. Over here, premeditated murderers get executed, manslaughter gets jail time. The action is still punished, but the intentions will be taken into consideration and affect the punishment.

Similarly, that was my point. That premeditated hopping for profit vs giving up after sticking it out beyond point of loss would be viewed differently by the rest of the pool. At least by those of us who would consider intentions when making our personal judgment on an issue, instead of following a rule book that assigns only one possible judgment to any particular outcome.



I did not say they are not within their right to do so, nor are they are doing anything technically wrong. If you track back to my very first post on this, I stated that I can't really find a strong technical basis to say it's unethical. But subjectively it's another thing because despite the technical consequences, we know it's quite a different thought process and intention behind the two.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/mFlX7CT6NFY

Unethical, is that a joke?
What is unethical in finding a job which pays the most for one hour of your work?

If there are many pools and they pay differently per share, than what's unethical in choosing a pool which pays the most? Prop pools offer more money for some shares and less money for other shares.
If a miner chooses to submit a share to a pool which pays less that other pools then it is not a honest miner - it is either a miner who doesn't care about money or just plain stupid.

It just happens that if everyone is willing to work for less, then everyone is actually paid the same for a single share in the long run, but there is nothing not ethical in not be willing to work for less. Everytime you submit a share to a PROP pool which has >= 43%*difficulty shares already submitted, you submit a share knowing that it will be worth less than 50/difficulty BTC. Pool hoppers don't steal from anyone. People who submit their shares for less then those shares should be worth are basically accepting underpayment.

As long as people are willingly submitting their shares for the EV less than their fair price and as long as PROP pools will offer more money for some other shares, hoppers will hop and submit shares where they are worth the most.

Unethical? rofl!

Suppose there are a group of real miners, say coal miners. And they have a bonus system, people get paid not just a flat fee for hours worked, but they get extra money based on how much coal is found.

Now suppose you have a guy who discovers that a mine has just found a big coal vein. They'll mine lots of coal and it's easy work. He joins the miners and mines alongside them, reaping a share of the rewards. As soon as the vein is mined out, and the other miners get ready for the hard work to expose a new vein, he quits. He joins up with another group of miners who found a vein. More importantly, this was his plan from the beginning -- to join when profits were high, and leave as soon as the hard work had to be done.

He gets a higher share of the bonuses relative to the work the other miners have done. And, more importantly, he is supposed to be on the same side as the miners. They're supposed to be cooperating workers working the same mine with aligned interests, not predators taking advantage of each other. That is, he breaches the implied agreement to mine in good faith and contribute fairly to the group but instead exploits the group to earn himself a greater than fair share, leaving the group in the lurch when times are tough.

Now, tell me, do you not see anything unethical about that? And, if you really don't, how can I be sure to avoid dealing with you?

*sigh*

To continue your 'coal mining' analogy - your putative miner is one of lots of miners who do this. Everyone knows about 'coal mine hopping' and there are some coal mines with payout schemes that prevent coal mine hopping.

There are lots of non prop mines and everyone knows the issues  - and believe me with bitHopper at the top of the 'miner software' subforum everyday it's not long before even new miners are aware - I can only assume that miners on prop pools either don't care or are in the process of moving to a non prop pool. Or the pool involved has developed a different way of recompensing fulltime miners.

This thread became completely irrelevant in record time.

JoelKatz. But what prevents other miners from your description to change to a better mine, when they are done with easy money?
But ok, if someone joined them, was acting as if he is there to stay longer and everyone was cooperating with that assumption, investing in him both emotionally and with money, but the guy deceived them - then yes it is unethical.

Now, what it has to do with mining a bitcoins and Hoppers? Nothing. JoelKatz, btc miners are not really cooperating with each other. Not at all. We are actually competing - for very limited resources which is 50 BTC/10 minutes. More miners, less money.

Mining pools are not real mines, where miners become buddies and they have to trust each other with their lives. A pool is just a proxy which pays you more often than if you mined solo, by reducing the variance.
When you submit the share to a pool you know, how much is it's expected value. If it is really small, then whose fault it is that you are submitting share to such a mine. Definitely not mine fault or none of the hoppers.
The PROP payout system is broken and unfair. But you are the only person who takes a responsibility for giving away your share to a pool which will pay less for it. The pool also takes responsibility for misinformation - name "proportional" is very misguiding and pool should clearly inform you that sometimes it will pay you less.

Now, why do you expect me to go submit a share for a less amount of money to some pool just because you are submitting such a share for less money? I'm declining to submit shares for less than 50/difficulty. I value my time and my hardware. I'll be happy to submit the share to the pool which offers the most for it and educate other people to do the same. But if you decide to submit your share for less, it is your choice and don't blame hoppers. I don't deceive anyone, I openly admin that I work for the pools which offer the most money, and there is nothing unethical about it.

Most of what you said was irrelevant.  Except this, so there's an implied agreement.  Okay, what are the rules for an implied agreement being reasonable?
Yes, yes.  I know you don't know.  However clearly an unreasonable implied agreement would not make the miner "unethical".  Such as one where s/he must sign over his house to the other miners until they decide s/he has earned it back in some unspecified way.

So in other words, you find this unethical but that's for no other reason than the fact you chose the implied agreement and consider it reasonable.  Don't you think it's a little naive and arrogant to believe that your ideas are the only right and reasonable ones?

Edit: Oh, and just so you know.  I will leave you when things get rough Joel.  No.  Please don't cry.

Since stories about miners are popular, let me post one to :)

One day, after working hard in a mine together for a whole day,  two miners go to a market. Each of them has 1 ounce of gold. At the market the average price is $1/ounce of gold. Bob offers however $2/once and Steve offers $0.1/once. both miners goes to Bob and sell their gold.
Next day is similar. After working hard in a mine together for a whole day, the same two miners go to a market. This time Bob offers $0.1/ounce and Steve offers $2/ounce. First miner goes to Bob, but second miner goes to Steve to sell his gold.
After that first miner says to the other one:
- "Why did you go to Steve, instead of Bob ?!"
- "Because Bob was paying crap today"
- "But yesterday we both went to Bob!"
-  :-[
- "I thought that we were friends. But you left me when the times are tough!"
-  :-[
- "You are an immoral cheater! If we go to a war and we will be on the same side, then I'll shoot you!"
-  :-[

Miners are predators.  By mining I make it harder for all other miners and decrease your income.    How about this,  I totally stop mining and instead of me getting 1BTC/day, all other miners give me, collectivity, 0.5BTC/day.  I save on electricity and you all get 0.5 more a day.

Honestly, what if I say we all halve our Mh/s tomorrow.  This only makes sense; we all gain.  But by your reasoning anyone who doesn't would be working with us; instead they would be trying to get more than his fair share.

Actually, tonight I will reduce my processing power in half, and anyone who doesn't is against me.  OR they realize that this prisoners dilemma is solved by defecting.

They're the same as every other implied agreement, good faith and fair dealing.
The implied agreement is always the same -- good faith and fair dealing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_covenant_of_good_faith_and_fair_dealing

If the point of your analogy was to show that it's possible to make arguments that are similar to mine that are invalid, congratulations, you did that.

Where my argument is invalid? Or di you mean that you argument was invalid and mine just similar?  ;D

Consider 2 miners. One hopper and one non-hopper. Imagine that both of them have 1GH/s. It takes both of them 4s to generate a share. Now one goes gives that share to a pool which offers a lot for it, but the other gives that share to a pool which offers less. What is immoral in that?

And really, the pool does not offer less for a share because of hoppers. It there were no hoppers that pool would still offer less for that share.

Well if by that you mean the article you linked to then it doesn't really make your point.  If I'm hired to mine coal for you I'm essentially agreeing to produce coal in exchange for dollars.   Unless the contract states it I'd say it's unreasonable to restrict when I quit (for example my employment agreement states that I am expected to give notice in which case quitting with no notice breaks that agreement).   Moving to another mine does not in any way change that I gave you coal in exchange for dollars.   It does not deny you the coal we agreed you would get from the dollars you knew you were spending in the time period you spent it.  So this is not a breech of faith.

...and while I applaud you for actually having a definition for a term.  Almost so much that I'd be willing to concede the point purely on the basis that it might encourage you to explore how actually knowing what you are talking about really makes debates productive. ;D  Off hand I can think of a couple of cultural references which had a different set of values.  So that might lose you the argument in the more general case.

As I explained, pool hopping breaches the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing between miners.

That is incorrect. The pool really does offer less for a share because of hoppers.

The expected payout per share is based on how many shares have already been accumulated towards the current block. The lower that number, the higher the payout per share. Now, consider a pool's hash rate. The more pool hoppers the pool has, the more the pool's hash rate will go up when there are fewer shares accumulated and will go down when there are more shares. The share count resets to zero when the pool finds a block, which is determined only by the average hashing power. So more pool hoppers means more of that average hashing power comes out at low share counts and less at high counts. This means the pool spends more time at high share counts than it does at low share counts.

For a non-hopping miner, the average payout per block is solely depending on the average share count. This goes up with more pool hoppers because the hash rate goes down when the share count is high, leading to more time spent at the higher count.

I do see a lot of defense of pool hoppers based on misunderstandings of the mathematics. The analogy to coal miners sharing a vein is apt. The more mine hoppers in this case, the less time the miners spend mining a vein (because there are more people mining then, so it goes faster) and the more time the miners spend trying to expose a new vein (because there are fewer people mining then).

Dude, seriously....what is it with you and your "implied covenant" or "implied agreement" or "implied contract" .....?

You seem to have ran out of real arguments looooong time ago. All you do in this whole thread is to repeat your own "implied agreements of good faith and fair dealing". Those agreements you are talking about do not exist, it's only what YOU read into it. They aren't real, they only exist in your head, it's what you(and only you) read between the lines. And just because you repeat it over and over again doesn't make your personal subjective interpretation of things that only you read between the lines reality for everyone else. ::)

Not to talk about your pointless analogies(vineyard, kill your mother, real miners) comparing apples and oranges over and over again.....


Now go on, tell me that i'm all wrong and that my argument is invalid. Tell us again that you see implied agreements.... you didn't point that out often enough yet. Repeat yourself for another 12 pages...  ::)

Were it not for several rather intellegent posts made by your account on several threads I would assume you a troll.  Given your reputation I offer my thoughts.

What is this implied agreement?  Can one fairly assume that other miners know of this agreement?  I certainly was not aware of it.

I understand implied agreements and try to be fair to those with whom I deal but I always reserve the right to think for myself, not divulge my thoughts, and use anything I learn to my advantage.  If a thing is not obviously implied (e.g. is pool hopping ok) then an explicit agreement should be made.  I will not be bound by agreements which exist only in the minds of others and certainly not those which encourage bad mathematics, hidden information, and inefficiency.

You don't have to worry about my taking advantage of non-hopping proportional miners.  I mine with simplecoin.us which uses 'pay per last n shares' and urge others who dislike the mess which stems from the fundamentally flawed 'proportional reward system' to give it a try.

Well you are right, that in a pool with pool hoppers miners will be paid less if there won't be pool hoppers. But this is only because the pool hoppers will compete with miners over the hot deals, while they will leave "bad deals" intact.

Since you mentioned math lets agree first on some facts, ok?
1) When the block is still being solved, share submitted with sequence number 100 has higher expected payout value than share submitted with sequence number 100000. (Proof draft: When submitting share number 100 or 100000, there is still the same expected number of shares needed to solve the block, that means the total number of shares will be higher in the latter case)
2) When there are no hoppers, miners submit shares, where some of them have expected value > 50 / difficulty and some of them have expected value  < 50 / difficulty. In the long run, the expected value of all shares together will average to 50 / difficulty.
3) With hoppers: hoppers do not submit shares with expected value < 50 / difficulty. However they submit shares with expected value > 50 / difficulty. That means 24/7 miners will receive less shares with expected value > 50 / difficulty. That way, those shares submitted with EV < 50 / difficulty by 24/7 miners will no longer be offset by the highly paid shares and in the long run such miner will receive less than 50 / difficulty per share.

However it is not hoppers fault, that there are miners who submit shares with low EV. Seriously, if you found ounce of gold and sold it for 1/3 of it's market price and later you tried to sell other ounce of gold for higher price than market price without success, would you really blame other people for your loss?

Hoppers are not forcing you to sell your shares to the pool for cheap. If you sell it for cheap, than it is purely your own responsibility and don't talk about covenant. We don't run a charity here and we will not skip hot deals just because you are doing bad deals with your shares.

Every agreement between two human beings has an implied component that the two people are dealing with each other in good faith. If two people enter into an agreement, there is no need for them to say, "By the way, are you okay with me ripping you off and lying and cheating? Is that cool?" Of course they implicitly agree that this is not cool That's how agreements work.

No, that is not true. They exist and they are legally and morally enforceable.

I don't know what you're talking about. Are you saying that you don't think contracts include an agreement to act in good faith and deal fairly?

I'll keep saying it as long as people actually don't understand that every agreement includes an implicit agreement that one is dealing fairly with the other party. This is recognized by pretty much every legal and moral system on the planet.

If this was not the case, every single agreement or contract would have a phase where people say "do you agree that you are negotiating in good faith, dealing fairly with me, and intend to comply with the agreements and not find some technical way to weasel out of them" and the other person would say "yes". That would be a pointless waste of time. (And otherwise, people would have to carefully read every page of every agreement lest some dishonest person sneak a word or two into a harmless-looking phrase that destroys the entire point of a contract. That would also be both inefficient and intolerable in civil society.)

Please take the five minutes to actually read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_covenant_of_good_faith_and_fair_dealing

It is not the hopper's fault that there are miners who submit shares with low EV. It is, however, the hopper's fault that there are miners who submit a disproportionate number of shares with low EV. That wouldn't happen if there were no hoppers. (Unless you had some kind of crazy reverse hopper who specifically chose to disproportionately submit shares with low EV.)

They are forcing you, because someone has to sell shares to the pool for cheap or the pool will stall. And the hoppers aren't doing it. They don't force any one particular person to do it, but they force someone to do it. (Or the pool dies.)

But it's ethics, not legal and moral codes in particular. That means in order to argue we must both know which ethical system the OP refers to. I didn't see it named anywhere.

So which ethical system are you saying this is a problem for? Many of the current and historical ethical systems are incongruous at best and contrary more often. Responding to arguments will be a little easier if we all know that. This is a question which I should have asked weeks ago.

Edit: this isn't so-called 'moral relativism' - it's a simple fact that

will have differing view on many ethical issues - look at the difference between US and UK libel law as an example.

Now I know where I saw your avatar before, its in the bible.

Jesus H. Christ :)

So now you are completely ignoring that we are specifically talking about pool hopping in this thread and not about contracts in general. My comment was referring to pool hopping and your ignorance of accepting that only you read "don't pool hop" between the lines of the pools TOS(if they even exist). You still have to provide evidence for your claim, btw. Where exactly did you find your implied agreements not to pool hop? Please show us the lines in TOS of the ten largest pools that made you read between the lines not to pool hop.

Yay \o/ Let's all repeat ourselves over and over again, the one who repeats himself the most often wins the "discussion" and his argument will magically become true for everyone else! JoelKatz is way ahead of us and is heading straight for the title "repeat-master" of this thread! Do you have a b-side or are you stuck in an infinite loop?

huh.

the only implied argument for me is "you give me $, i give you a part of it" to the pool.

How shall I take that statement down...let me count the ways.  ;D

Well for one you're probably building a strawman.  LeFBI might mean that there is no implied component in any contract.  However I doubt that's true.  What is more likely true he is that he disagrees that your particular implied component is implied in every contract.  In other words that your definition of "fair" is generally accepted.  

Which is your problem Joel my man is that you keep loading the term "fair" with all of your petty cultural biases.  Sure the "Implied Covenant of Good Faith" might be considered reasonable in most cultures - however it's purpose is to protect a very specific thing.  The things your contract promises you.  That is, to a point someone should not be able to use the terms of a contract to undermine the things the contract promises.  Which is rational.  It is not unreasonable to assume that the purpose of the contract is to obtain for each party the things spelled out in the contract.  However when you give an example of mining - the exchange of money for ore - clearly leaving a company is allowed as long as that is within the terms of the contract (i.e. conforms to the contracts requirement for notice) so what I decide to leave the company for does not directly undermine the ore that you got from me. Ergo the "implied covenant of good faith" has absolutely nothing to say on the matter.

Now clearly you could word a contract in a way that would deliberately restrict mine hopping or even attach some meaning to the bonus structure.  For example if you called that bonus explicitly a "retention bonus" which is for some reason paid a priori then you would have an argument.  However your long, petty, meandering diatribe about being with the company in good times and bad.   Is completely unreasonable because, broadly interpreted it significantly interferes with a persons ability to pursue a paying job ("Sorry, you can't leave until the economy bounces back!").

So as is often your problem you are equivocating. Even if every agreement included the "implied covenant of good faith" that does not necessitate your ideas about "fairness" ie. "no mine hopping".  

So until you come up with an argument to support that - your point is dead.

(And incidentally it's worth noting that ICFG is considered poor practice by the US and Canada.   From my understanding it's been replaced by "gap filling".  The...almost platonic (in the classical sense)...notion that there exists some "true agreement" and attempting to determine what that is and enforcing that rather than a specific set of cultural biases.  )

I made that argument about 10 places in this very thread. But just in case you somehow missed them all, I'll repeat some of them for you:

"A pool hopper does benefit at the expense of other miners."

"That is nothing like a mining pool where many miners believe their interests are aligned."

"If you left the pool because you want to shift a disproportionate share of the work to the other miners, only to re-enter it when you claim a disproportionate share of the profit, that's bad faith. That's abusing the system to get a share greater than your fair share at the expense of your fellow miners."

"Pool hoppers see it as a competition to get the most from the cake. Other miners believe that it's a cooperative. That's the problem. If everyone understands it's a competition, that's fine. But otherwise, you expect that the guys on the same team as you are playing for the team, not themselves."

"Entering a profit-making cooperative with others when times are good, taking a disproportionate share of the profit earned by the work of others, only to desert the cooperative as soon as hard work is necessary to make more profit, with the intent of re-joining the cooperative as soon as the hard work is done in time to get another disproportionate share of the profit is an inherently unethical practice."

Firstly, only one of those things actually qualifies as an argument and that one doesn't appear to be the argument I asked for.  So you can understand why I didn't mention them.  ;D

Next I suspect you're missing the point a bit here so.  Do you mind clarifying if you are saying that these things you are claiming above are derived from the legal understanding of the "implied covenant of good faith" or are they implied through some other means?

If the former then you need to show how these necessitate not a breach of YOUR personal idea of "good faith" but rather how it undermines a particular element expressed in the contract - which is what the ICoGF - as weak as it is legally - protects.   As far as the pools I've been involved with there isn't much in the way of a contract.   Without such an agreement and assuming you are arguing that "unless specified as acceptable pool hoping is always unethical" then it would seem reasonable that the broadest sense of "mining" would prevail here: "I will give you computing time on my machine for some period in exchange for some share of what the pool generates in the same time period as derived by their payback algorithm".   Can you explain, specifically which relationship explicitly stated in that definition is undermined by pool hopping.

If the later then your point is probably dead but if you want to pursue it I'd start with your third quoted statement the other three are garbage (in terms of a logical argument).

Mining exists for a reason, you know. By increasing your hashrate you are making the Bitcoin network more secure, and rewarded for it.

I see there's still plenty of pontification here...

all these arguments against hoping are totally useless.  they are your "hurt" feeling.  that's all they are.

If you want to start having a real and useful debate, let's see some Terms Of Service or agreements from pools.

If a pool ain't got one, then you all just wasting your breath.

words like believe, belief, faith, common, implied, un-implied etc... etc.. don't mean squat without set rules that miners agree to.

no agreement = no rules.

Wait a minute, why is it that pools don't have them? Hmmm.....

This is typical. The people who defend pool hopping deny that there's such a thing as an implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing and argue that only written rules apply to them. They claim people have no obligation to deal fairly with others and that they can make agreements in bad faith and if other people don't like it, well that's just their hurt feelings.

Well, that's not the way society works, and that's not the law. Please actually read this until you understand it:
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/implied+covenant+of+good+faith+and+fair+dealing

It has to be this way. Otherwise, lawyers would get phenomenally rich as every agreement in life would require a written contract and a single shifty sentence snuck in by one party could completely deprive the other party of the intended benefit. Agreements simply don't work that way.

This not wishful thinking or hurt feelings, it's how the real world actually works. It's "if I didn't sign it, I don't have to comply with it" that's absurd wishful thinking and in complete disagreement with how the real world, and real society, actually works.

The anti-social nature of these arguments reflects the anti-social nature of pool hopping.

I would say it is fine. Just like stocks no one holds all their eggs in one basket. Pool hopping isn't even a guaranteed to be successful due to the luck factor. Also if you are manually changing pools than you are spending quite a bit of time which could be served doing something else. I use slush and arsbitcoin so pool hopping doesn't effect me much.

Wow, are you kidding me?!!! did you read it yourself?  well, obviously you did, but you are completely wrong with its application/understanding.

"n. a general assumption of the law of contracts, that people will act in good faith and deal fairly without breaking their word, using shifty means to avoid obligations, or denying what the other party obviously understood. A lawsuit (or one of the causes of action in a lawsuit) based on the breach of this covenant is often brought when the other party has been claiming technical excuses for breaching the contract or using the specific words of the contract to refuse to perform when the surrounding circumstances or apparent understanding of the parties were to the contrary. Example: an employer fires a long-time employee without cause and says it can fire at whim because the employment contract states the employment is "at will." However, the employee was encouraged to join the company on the basis of retirement plans and other conduct which led him/her to believe the job was permanent barring misconduct or financial downturn. Thus, there could be a breach of the implied covenant, since the surrounding circumstances implied that there would be career-long employment."

You are misleading people by stating:
"The people who defend pool hopping deny that there's such a thing as an implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing and argue that only written rules apply to them"
you are trying to say that we deny the existance of and therefore are wrong:
-implied covenant of good faith
-fair dealing
this is absurd and false.  we are not denying these concepts, BUT they don't apply here.  these legal principles are in contract law.

where's the bitcoin mining law?  where's the contract?

it is applicable to contracts.  yes, signed, executed, legal contracts that have 2 parties.  where's my mining contract?  the one I have to agree to... not some implied, assumed, verbal blah blah blah...

contract, where is it???  what word have I given? what obligation have I agreed to, show it to me since i don't recall seeing it...
show me the contract I'm breaching.  (and not the one made up in someones head)

every contract i draft, sign or execute has a good faith article in it.  that's where this covenant is from and that's its domain.  it doesn't exist without an executed contract.  that's how the real world works.

your example of the candy bar is weak and doesn't apply.  you have a problem with it, contact the store or the manufacturer.  you will get relief.

you are also confusing how society operates.  there are laws that govern society that spell things out.  there's nothing wishy washy about this.  it is not an anti-social argument.  it has nothing to do with society.  

it has everything to do with understanding the bitcoin algorithm and using this knowledge.

and that's precisely what you don't like if you really get honest with yourself.  you don't like the technical weaknes. it's that simple.

Putting aside for the moment the counters that given the argument "X is unethical" is not proved by "X is illegal" or "X is part of my highly-biased sample of events in the world".  Not to mention that you have provided zero evidence for it being either the general case in society or the law where you are (see my prior comments about "gap filling").

Anyway it's very interesting that you don't seem to understand the very definition you direct people to.


Notice that the employer here has to take an action from which long term employment is implied during the course of dealing.   So given that you have not disclosed what further action has to take place.  It seems reasonable that you are simply asserting that the action of joining a pool is as unambiguous in usage of trade to mean "no pool hopping" as say "Hamburger" is to what one gets when they order one in North America.

If true this means at least two things:

i) You are begging the question - in other words you have no real argument for your position.  So I'd take it as a personal favor if you'd stop pretending like you do.
ii) Not clearly true and possibly false - since there is a number of people who do not believe this.

I already addressed this in several places, with the example of the person who joins a coal mining cooperative right as they uncover a vein with the intention of leaving as soon as they have to search for the next vein.

Feel free to address the argument if you like, but please stop denying it exists. I'll repeat it one more time:

Say coal miners have a cooperative where they share in the profits. A miner joins the cooperative just as they uncover a rich vein. He stays in during the easy mining, getting a share of the profits from that vein. Just as the vein is exhausted and the other miners are settling in for the hard work of exposing a new vein, he leaves them to join another cooperative that has just unearthed a rich vein. This was his plan from the beginning, and he gets a disproportionate share of the benefits relative to the amount of mining he does at the expense of the other miners.

1) Is this unethical?

2) Does it breach the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing between the miners in the cooperative?

3) If you answered "yes" to 1 or 2, how is pool hopping different?

This is another improper, misleading attempt.

"Say coal miners have a cooperative where they share in the profits."

such coal miner, joining/participating in a co-operative will be a party to said cooperative's agreement.  also known as a shareholder agreement of sorts.

-a legal document.  spelling things out. what's expected of the miner and what the breaches are and their penalties.

it's a signed contract.

This is also under minerals laws, EPA, labor laws, contract laws and a boat load of other federal, state and local laws.

I ask you again,  show me our mining laws and the mining contract.

Where are they?

This again shows the anti-social nature and absurdity of the arguments used by those who defend pool hoppers. They insist that their only obligations, legal or moral, are to comply with signed contracts. I wouldn't want to live in such a society, and thankfully, I don't.

It's not absurd because it's true and it's a fact. the co-op has a contract. you can not be a part of co-op without being a party to co-op's contract.  try to join one without a contract and laws.  tell us how it goes.  tell us what non-anti-social society recognizes such a co-op.

i think maybe you want some communal or utopian examples instead? oh wait, those don't work...

what's absurd is how your dislike of a technical weakness has been contorted by you into an attempt to try to use everything that has it's roots in law and contracts to argue applicability when there's a lack of law or contract.

no it is not an anti-social nature (btw, lookup the definition since you like them so much), they (we) comply with ALL the laws of a (our) society as well.  when we don't, consequences are spelled out and are applied.  that is the society you live in.


Where are bitcoin mining laws?  where's that mining contract?

That's why we have the doctrine of implied agreements and covenants of good faith. Otherwise, we'd have to make perfect written agreements before we could cooperate, and that would be extremely inconvenient. Your argument that there would be a written contract that covers this makes my point -- if a written contract would cover it, and there's no written contract, then it's covered by the implied agreement. The whole purpose of implied agreements is to eliminate the necessity of written contracts.

There's no lack of law or contract. Implied agreements and covenants of good faith and fair dealing are certainly part of law. And as for there being no contract, whenever people cooperate economically with expectations, there's a contract.

I agree.

I've already explained this to you many, many times. Whenever people agree to economic cooperation, there's a contract. It can be written, verbal, implied, or a bit of each. Again, you are being blatantly anti-social when you say "I can take advantage of others however I want, I didn't sign an agreement not to". That's not how civil society works, and you wouldn't want to live in such a society. You couldn't do anything without a written agreement, and you'd need to hire perfect lawyers to go over that contract, lest it contain a hidden clause that deprives you of the expected benefit. To argue that we actually live that way is crazy. We don't need "bitcoin mining laws" because we have a law of contract that has been developed over centuries, and it doesn't all go away just because bitcoins are new.

Getting back to the thread topic (harrumph) law is not the final arbiter of ethics, and one nation's law can be vary different to another, as can one nations sense of morals. Is there an internationally accepted set of morals? How many countries ahve similar ethical stances to your own, only varying in one particular or another?

Ethics will only be opinion until everyone agrees on what is moral and what is not (regardless of local laws) and whether or not pool hopping is ethically sound will be a moot point until the bitcoin mining community can agree on what the community's moral code entails.

If that's what we're doing here, I propose we accept the voting results and define our moral standard on this issue based on those results.

This is not the best forum to go into the theory of ethics on, but that's a load of nonsense. Even the most clearly objective facts (such as that the Earth is closer to round than flat) are not universally agreed upon. That doesn't make the Earth's shape only opinion. When people largely agree on things, more interesting than the fact that they agree are the facts that cause them to agree. For example, people largely agree that the Earth is closer to round than flat because of some specific facts -- specifically, that the Earth is in fact round.

The agreement is entirely superfluous. If there is an agreement, it's the fact that underlie that agreement that are important. (Otherwise, the agreement is entirely coincidental and of no value whatsoever.) And if the facts justify whatever it is that people agree on, it doesn't particularly matter than they happen to agree on it as well.

Across cultures, people almost universally agree that torturing children for pleasure is immoral. That's interesting, but if torturing children for pleasure is immoral, it's not the fact that people largely agree on it that makes it so. Whatever facts lead people to agree on it would also lead to it being in fact immoral. These facts are identifiable and testable. We do not need to resort to "belief makes it so".

Yes, but facts are not always useful in ethics - for example just because something might be best for the majority might not be an ethical thing to do. Or we'd all be Utilitarians. There are whole groups of people who's personal moral code would conflict with yours and probably mine.


Again with the facts. Morals are whatever the majority of a culture decide they are. Agreement is the only thing that determines what is moral. How many wives can a man have and still be a moral man?


Strawman, and wrong. People do not find torturing children immoral because of facts - it would be possible to describe a situation where it may be the only response to a greater evil.

But people would still find it repugnant, even if considering the facts told them it was the right thing to do. This is because it is a biologically instinctive response, not a factually considered one. What are the anti torturing facts you refer to?

Many mammals have the same biological response toward their offspring - is that fact driven, or just a biological response?

There's a very big difference between an issue will strongly affect all humans equally (damaging biological offspring) and issues that do not affect all humans equally (pool hopping, which does not have a biological base or an evolutionarily driven reason to find it repugnant).

In cases where there is no obvious (biologically instinctive) outcome and logical argument does not sway either side, then the majority should decide the accepted moral values for the community. Just like in any other community - religious or secular.

If you guys keep this up that poor troll's going to die from overeating.

Any idea how I can permanently remove this thread from my "updated topics" section?

I think the only way is to convince Theymos to switch to a forum software which has this feature. I'll support a switch for the same feature.

... and for the time being, when you go to "Updated Topics" you can hit "mark all messages as read" which will get rid of the notification without you having to go to the thread concerned - as long as you don't have other unread threads there.

So if everyone on the planet decided that slavery was moral, that would make it so? If everyone decided that torturing children for pleasure was moral, that would make it so?

Bluntly, I don't believe that you really believe this. But on the off chance that you really do, you are a monster.

I could explain why you are wrong, but it would take many pages and is way beyond the scope of this forum. But for here, suffice it to say that it is clear to me that you are lying. You are like the person who insists the sky does not look blue to them under normal day conditions. If it really doesn't, then you are broken in some way. But more likely, you are just lying because you think I cannot prove the sky looks blue.

Then why do people largely agree that torturing children for pleasure is immoral? Magic? Coincidence?

What you're saying is completely incoherent. I honestly have no idea how to respond to it because it's so nonsensical. The best I can do to point you towards common sense is to ask you -- instinctive response to what? (Hint: facts.)

Why do you think all these people have the same instinctive response? Coincidence? Magic? If not facts, what else is there?

Way to quote out of order and out of context, and still not understand the point.

1. I'm lying about nothing. I never said these thing were within my moral compass, just that at different times and places different versions of morality have existed. You don't believe that I believe this? I really don't understand how you can not believe that in any given society the majority determine what is moral. Name me a culture where morality is not whatever the majority believe to be the best for their society.

2. Morality is not an unvarying unchanging thing. Slavery was considered moral, now it's not. What things do we hold to be moral now that won't be in the future?

3. Believing that people from other cultures will on occasion make choices radically different from my own does not make me a monster. Believing that all cultures make the same choices as those you deem to be correct is the sort of ignorance that leads to misunderstanding, misery and war. Some religions have specialised in this sort of thing.

4. Where's the incoherency? Animals protect their young - a valid instinctive response. Children are young humans. Most people feel a need to protect children even if not their own. People don't have think about why your example is abhorrent, they just know it to be so. Many people would have a hard time thinking of facts to explain their response. What facts would you say there are? (Hint: "it is an evil act" is not a valid fact).

5. Do you honestly believe there's no biological basis for morality? From your inability to respond I'd say yes. Is this a religious problem for you?

6. Religion shouldn't be a final arbiter of ethics for a deep thinker like you. Many religions are not cultures I'd hold up as bastions of morality.

7. Finally, your last sentence makes no sense so I can only assume I've kept you up late. Responses based on instinct are not are not responses based on an understanding of the facts. Instincts are actually responses that require no conscious comprehension of facts whatsoever. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instinct (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instinct)

Is taking money from a retarded guy ethical?

Is a lioness acting ethically when she kills an antelope?

I guess pool hopping is somewhere between these two.

So you admit, the ones not hopping are retarded... ;D

This whole topic is retarded. A fact is a fact, and an opinion will always be an opinion. They are not the same. The nicest color to me is blue, that is my opinion, prove me wrong. It is the same with ethics, its just an opinion.

I pool hop because I can. I don't care if people find it unethical. If you think you are being screwed by hoppers, do not hop at a pool that can be hopped.

All the examples trying to prove hopping is wrong or right are correct for the person posting their reasons. I hop because I can, and I hop because it brings me more coins. Those are 2 facts that we cannot argue about. Deal with it.

People might agree or disagree, but you cannot tell me I am wrong, because its my opinion, just like I cannot tell you you are wrong.

When using logic, we must follow fact, not opinion.

Vladimir, in my post above I was just being sarcastic...

Okay, answer my question directly: If everyone on the planet believed that torturing children for pleasure was moral, would that make it moral to torture children for pleasure?

That's a non-sequiter. I never said it was unvarying or unchanging. I was talking about what it is, not what it was or would be.

Non-sequiter. You have to address what I actually said, not some generalized version of that you can pretend you think I agree with. (Of course, I don't. It's like pretending that because I believe 3 plus 2 is 5, I believe that any number plus 2 is 5.)

I said that if you really believed that torturing children for pleasure would actually be moral just because people believed it was, then you were a monster. There are actually a few other possibilities, which I'll mention her just to be complete:

1) You are lying. You know that torturing children for pleasure is immoral no matter what people believe.

2) You have some secret deceptive "out". For example, you are reasoning "a false proposition implies any proposition" or "so much would have to change for people to not believe torturing children for pleasure is immoral that perhaps the facts underlying that piece of morality would change as well" or some such.

The incoherency is that you are saying there are no facts and then when challenged to explain it, you cite a bunch of facts. Sure, people would have a hard time thinking of the facts that explain their response. At one time, people had no idea what facts accounted for the sky appearing blue, but that doesn't mean there weren't such facts or that the sky looked whatever color people said it looked.

Of course I believe there's a biological basis for morality. I've been saying all along that morality has a factual basis. (Biology, in case you didn't realize this, consists entirely of facts.)

I'm not sure why you think I'm bringing religion into it. Perhaps you forgot that you were the one claiming that morality was not based on facts.

It's hard to be polite when you can say something so stupid and so insultingly at the same time, but I will do my best. Yes, instincts don't require conscious comprehension of facts. But that doesn't mean instinctive responses aren't purely fact based. Our instincts are responses to sensory data, which originates from facts about the world around us and gets to our body through a causal chain that is entirely factual. We respond in the way we do because of facts about how we are constructed. An instinctive response is not random. It is not magical. It is the end result of a cause and effect chain and the facts of the world that input that chain and form the links of that chain. Yes, it does not require conscious comprehension of facts. But so what?

Color vision doesn't require conscious comprehension of facts. Is the sky whatever color people say it is? Is the sky and the grass the same color if people only say so? Or is the sky blue because of facts about Rayleigh scattering? And do the sky and grass appear different colors because of facts about their composition, how human color vision works, and so on?

But from another post...

Before you go, just to clarify, when you say;



Who are you talking about?

So you say


Then I ask who you are talking about, then your answer is:


Meaning the ones who do not hop.

I would loosly define a retarded person as a person with a low mental capacity.

so the logic would be those who do not hop are retarded.

seems clear to me thats what you are saying.

But whatever, thanks for the advice on logic classes, Im looking into it rigt now... ::)

Here's your first class:

all a's are b != some a's are b.

For example, all fulltime miners are stupid != some full time miners are stupid. In this case the difference would be (and I'm talking for Vladimir here) that not all full time miners mine at hoppable pools.

To be clear. I'm not denying that you are making some arbitrary argument.  I'm saying that you haven't made an argument sufficient to close the gap between ICoFDaGF and your idea of "no pool hopping".



Is this the same as?

If not, please cite the specific differences.

And for crying out loud...

A Non sequitur (spelled correctly for once) is an argument that does not force it's OWN conclusions. So if you say "Candy is good" and then "Therefore all candy is mine" this is a non sequitur since the property "good" does not imply "owned by JoelKatz" (except trivially).   It does not make comment on other peoples abilities to properly state or refute your argument.  We, in fact have completely different words for these things:

A person who is refuting an argument you have not made is making a strawman fallacy.
A person who is making an argument that draws a conclusion that does not contradict your thesis or is a distraction from your point is enaging in ignoratio elenchi  or perhaps a red herring fallacy

Not only that but a non sequitur is a pretty vague term to pin on someone.  It would be better and far more to the norm in logical literature to cite the specific direction and terms of the logical flaw being used. i.e. Affirming the consequent.

Sheesh did everyone go to the "bitcoin2cash" school of chop logic?

I am missing something here...We are talking about those who mine 24/7 in successfully hopped pools, meaning the non hopper, because the hopper will not stay 24/7...

But thank you again for showing me that you are the best. Had you not pointed it out I would never have known.

The problem here is that a bunch of people claim that there are certain legal principles that are governing joining a pool or sending work to one.

This is completely wrong.  If the pool has to stated terms of service that prohibit hopping, there's no contract.

The only way you can apply legal principles in contract law is when you are bound by some contract.  if there's no contract, you CAN NOT sit on your high horse and continue to spew legal principles.  this is blatantly wrong and misleading.

You can not pull out and enforce a contract that someone did not agree to.

You can not claim implied contract when you don't like technically permitted behavior. The remedy is not with the user but with the pool.

Additionally, you are not entering a contract by simply "working" on the same thing, like sending work to a pool.  this is another fallacy.
you enter a contract by explicitly agreeing to one.  you can not enforce a contract that was never agreed to.

be honest and admit that those who are against hopping, simply don't like it.  that's where this argument should stop.
I don't like it, I don't do it, but as long as a pool does not prohibit hoping in it's terms of service, those who don't like hoping are SOL.

Force the pools to clearly state what the policy on hopping is.

However, as you all know, lots of pools simply don't care, in fact ultimately they want higher hash rates.  they don't care how they get them and for how long.

Which, begs the question?  who is the enabler of hopping?  the algorithm, the pool or the miner?

P.S. it's clear that this is pointless to continue.  we have people who mis-use legal principles, twist them to meet their ends, mis-apply them in order to be able to put a bunch of big, legal sounding words to appear like they know what they are talking about.

we have people here that bring up esoteric, wild, provocative examples that are not even in the same ball-park as this argument.

all a bunch of useless nonsense.

No no no. Lets go over that first class again. We'll substitute instead hoppable pools and non hoppable pools.

all pools are hoppable != some pools are hoppable.

Vladimir was making the distinction between:
1. Hoppable pools
2. Pools that cannot be hopped.
3. 24/7 miners on hoppable pools
4. 24/7 miners on non-hoppable pools
5. Hoppers.

You seem to only consider cases 1, 3 and 5 for some reason.

Class dismissed.

+1


I really have to learn to ignore this thread when it pops up.

It would be impossible to argue that such an implied contract exists if there are no terms of service at all.  you can argue forever about what should be in there or not.  the burden is not on the miner to figure out the intent.  This is clearly a pool operator's issue.


now that's a much more appropriate and fascinating point/question!!! bravo!
+43% LOL

I would agree that some kind of contract is in place but from my understanding this is derived from a few things.  The first is what is involved in the process of getting involved.  So the websites content may not be usable as evidence of terms if it is not visible before someone commits.  Common industry practice is usually reserved for interpreting words - especially technical ones.  i.e. being paid "on spec".  It, AFAIK does not matter what the industry generally *does*.  Since that could justify all sorts of unethical behavior.

Anyway I suspect that much of this is beside the point.  Legal does not necessitate ethical.

Actually the case is far from being simple, as there is no exact definition of what pool hopping even is. If you define it as someone only submitting valid shares until 43.5% of difficulty have been reached, how do you classify people who mine until 45% or 100% or 150% (even at 150% hopping is mildly profitable!)? Does submitting a single share at 50% difficulty make you no longer a hopper? Where do you draw the line?

To enforce these rules, you need to publish them in the most exact manner + give users ways to make sure they stay "lawful" (so no delayed stats!).
A negative example on banning hopping would be "bitminersunion.org" who seeem to have developed a "hopping protection" for their prop. pool that they don't wnat to publish, don't want to explain in detail and if you complain that they stole shares from you, they claim that their algorithm is infallable and you MUST be a hopper. There was NO mentioning of even any payout algorithm (and nothing about pool hopping being punished/disallowed) on their website. Ever.

Edit:

1) This depends on how earnings are being distributed. As he seems to have earned as much as others, who were mining far longer than him, I'd say there is a flaw in their distribution system and he's gaming it. If (for whatever reason) there would be no other way to distribute earnings, then yes, this would be unethical in my opinion.

2) As he is imo no real part of the cooperative but just a newcomer that is suddenly appearing and being accepted, I'd go with a cautious "no".

3) There are alternative ways of distributing mined coal earnings/bitcoins. Even in your example the guy can ONLY game the system, because the coal miners seem to use a broken payout algorithm or overpaying him willingly/knowingly. Using fair payout schemes, neither your example nor pool hopping would be possible. If it is possible, it would only be unethical imho if the miner in your example would be the only person in the world having this knowledge. If everyone could do it in theory, then it's an individual choice of NOT doing it, even if it means earning less.
It is current state of knowledge that pool hopping increases your income, potentially very significantly. If you don't do it, you willingly decrease your income, just like using a CPU for mining, where it is common knowledge that it is so inefficient, that you'll burn more money for electricity than you'll earn in bitcoins at current market values. Profiting from decisions of others is not unethical - if the miners in your example decide that he has earned his too big share, he has earned it. It would only be unfair, if there would be no way for the other miners to make sure how much he gets paid. This is not the case in Bitcoin mining (and also not coal mining - which is most likely "Pay per hour" with a few potential bonuses, like any other job).

So are you saying that to earn more than others who have worked longer is unethical in general?  I think there's more to it than that.

  Anyway I think the physical mining model doesn't really capture what bitcoin mining is like.  It's probably more like a voluntary lottery pool where each week people put whatever they can spare (we will call this "lotto money") into a pool and at the end of the month tickets are purchased for the draw happening that day. The draw always pays out the same amount and winnings are divided according to the money invested i.e.: lotto payout * (Your $$ invested/Total $$ invested by everyone in the pool).

  So each week an employee is faced with the decision of if they should invest their "lotto money" or not.   One of the things which would influence that is how much of a share this would buy them.  Given that everyone at the company does not make the same amount of money and has different expenses the pool grows in an irregular way.  So each time you invest your "lotto money" you are not necessarily getting the same return on investment.   That is to say, this week the pool is at $1000 so if nobody invests any more money you would earn 0.05 * payout if they win.   However next week the pool might be $10000 which means your $50 only buys you 0.005 * payout if they hold the winning ticket.

  Since we can't predict if or how much people will put into the pool tomorrow.  The only information that can guide your decision to invest is the current size of the pool.   This gets more interesting when your office has more than one pool and each week you can decide whether to put your $50 in with the HR folk (which is $1000) or the IT Folk (which is at $10) or the Executives (which at $100,000).  It is this decision which people are calling intrinsically unethical.

That's not really a good example because if the pool is larger, the probability to win is also larger, so the expectation is the same.

If the odds of winning the lottery are poor enough the difference in pool probability is negligible.

Negligible in absolute terms but not in relative terms. If you double the size of your lottery pool, your chances of winning millions doubles. In absolute terms, it increased by something like .0004%. In relative terms, it increased by 100%.

Which is sort of the point now isn't it?  Meni appeared to be talking about the persons perception (expectation) of winning - which IMHO doesn't really change the argument since an intrinsically unethical act wouldn't suddenly become ethical if there was significant advantage.  Anyway in the interest of trying to make the example as palatable as possible as long as someone perceives the difference in probability to be negligible or non-existent it doesn't really matter if they have twice (or a million) times the probability of winning.  

It's still a better example than one about coal miners needlessly cluttered with overly emotional terms.  ;D

Two things I noticed about Raulo's paper on pool hopping:

First there is no component of time in any of the reward calculations. This is curious because humans usually consider a reward as a rate of return over time.

Second, the paper claims that (assuming a contributed mode pool):


 the cheater payment share is
                                        λ
                             S(λ, x) =                               (5)
                                       λ+x
and is non-zero for all x and λ > 0 which shows that in this continuous
model in contributed mode cheating always pays.


Well, the first and most obvious counter example to this is that if all participants of pool A hop out and nobody hops in. Since pool A now has an effective hash rate of 0 Mh/s the cheater payment share will never be realized because the next block will never be found by that pool. That implies a total rate of return for all the hoppers of zero.

Let us now modify this scenario slightly, all participants of pool A hop out at 50% of the shares needed to find the next block. The cheater payment for the next block will be 25BTC (to be divided amongst the hoppers according to their individual shares) when the block is found. 1 intrepid soul hops in and grinds away for however long it takes to find the next block. Nobody else hops in. When the next block is found, that intrepid soul contributed half of the shares and receives 25BTC reward for his efforts. Now I realize that one cannot know for certain when this 50% of shares required to find the block has been reached. That point does however fall within the continuum of the cheater payment share equation and appears to be a zero gain under these circumstances. Let us presume that these hoppers have network of magic 8 balls that will notify them of the exact half-way point in the block search.

One could further presume that the intrepid soul has immense hashing power at his/her command and this power is in fact equal to the combined rate of all those who hopped out of the pool. If this person hops in after everyone has hopped out, it appears there is no cheater payment to be had. Since the hash rates of the hoppers and the soul are equal, the rate of return over time is unchanged.

A further counter example is if the intrepid soul (let us call him Ralph) has been there from the start of the current block search. Ralph will acquire 25% of the shares at the point which the hoppers consult their magic 8 balls and leave (@ 50% of the shares required to find the next block). Ralph will then continue the search by his lonesome and the total search will consume 150% of the time it would have taken had none of the hoppers left. Ralph will acquire 75% of the shares for the block and earn 37.5 BTC. The cheaters payment needs be part of the 25% of the shares acquired by the hoppers before they left. This rate of return of hopping has been degraded by the additional time it has taken for Ralph to search for it on his own.

Maybe I need more coffee, but I am having trouble reconciling these scenarios with what was predicted on page 3 of the paper.

wth @ this thread.

Is stopping mining immoral? Is starting to mine somewhere else immoral?

This is only an issue because amateurs get all in a tizzy about not getting paid during a disconnect.

This is because the calculation is relative to the fair reward, which itself is tied to time with the miner's hashrate.

It is assumed that are enough continuous miners so that a block is eventually found.

That's a pretty strong presumption. Everything about pool-hopping relies on the random nature of block finding, ignoring this results in nonsense.


You may want to have a look at the paper I'm working on (http://bitcoil.co.il/pool_analysis.pdf) which I believe, if I may say so myself, does a better job discussing pool-hopping than Raulo's paper.

This is of course all off-topic for this thread, which is about ethics.

The calculations ignore that the hoppers change the rate the reward is realized by their movement from one pool to the next. They also accelerate the rate at which the reward for the pool they hopped too is realized, including the part that was calculated before they arrived.

Eventually, but leaving the pool degrades the reward to be obtained from that pool. The paper ignores the time component and treats the reward as constant.


It doesn't matter whether they actually hit 50% or not, it works for any percentage whether they are correct or not. The half way point just makes the math easy, and it is contained within the continuum which is supposed to be non-zero. It doesn't matter where the miners think they are, the point is that a single counter example exists for which the continuum is zero. A miner could leave randomly, land on 37.82734% and it just makes the addition annoying. All I was doing was providing a counter example in a continuum which was claimed to be non-zero for all values of x.


I shall look at that paper. Until we quantify under what circumstances hoppers can obtain benefits, we cannot understand the ethics of the behavior.
(time elapses)
I have looked at the paper. It is indeed a better explanation, however you still have the assumption that hopper hash rate will be magically replaced after it has left the pool. Why would anyone hop into a pool that has over 43.5% shares already submitted when they have a choice of a better pool? Nobody has yet discussed the decay rate of hopper's rewards over time in the pool they leave as compared to the expected rewards in a new block in a new pool for which there is suddenly more competition.

One of my contentions is that after some percentage of the pool hops, it becomes counter productive. Moreover, the supply of pools is quite small and I could see scenarios of hopper congestion given a large enough population of hoppers.

The existence of hoppers changes the % of time the pool spends in young rounds - hoppers make the pool grow old faster. This does decrease the total benefit that can be achieved. However, if a hopper does find a pool with a young round, this does not change the amplification factor for shares he submits. The payout per share will be B/N, where N is the total number of shares which will be found in this round, which is distributed geometrically conditioned on I shares having already been found. Time plays no role with this part.

In the limit where everyone hops, all proportional pools will be stuck at 43.5%, and thus no more hopping can be done.

It doesn't work this way. If you condition on the total number of shares in the round of course you'll find there's no benefit. You need to condition on the number of shares already found.

If you say they hop at 50% of the total shares in the round (and it doesn't matter if it's 50% or some other number, if they know it or not, or whatever), you're leaving open the possibility that they will mine until 1.5D shares were found in a round whose total is 3D, which is something they will not do, since they leave at 0.435D.

The longer the round is, the less % of the total shares the hopper will have in this round. It is in this way that the hopper biases his share distribution towards shorter rounds, thus getting more reward per share.

If everyone hops, the result is known - all proportional pool will end as no one will mine past 43.5%. The situation I analyze is the situation in practice, that hoppers are a minority. The hopper's rewards don't decay over time as the pool's reward system has no consideration of time. The amplification factor as a function of round age doesn't change. What does change is how young the rounds are expected to be. If the hopper does find a pool with a young round he should choose it over fallback mining (in all cases it is assumed that the hopper has a solo / fair pool option available for which he mines if there are no milkable proportional pools).

The payout in absolute terms does not decay. The rate of return decays. In my opinion, time should always be a component when evaluating human behavior in an economic context.


It was just a counter-example to discount a claim that a function was always continuous and positive. It was not meant to disprove the existence of rewards for pool hopping. They do exist, but I believe they have been quantified in a way that is misleading. Vladimir brings up an excellent point with mtred where it's hashrate changed from 100Gh/s to 400Gh/s to 100Gh/s. There are only a few pools available and the longer that mtred spends in the unfavorable share of a block, the longer it cannot be hopped into. This is a corner case where the number of pools is small and the length of rounds is potentially very large because of increased difficulty and dramatically lower hash rate.


Yes. But it was supposed to be a single counter-example in the form of "what if this occurred once when the stars are aligned, the result will be zero". It was not meant as a template for behavior in mining.


Hoppers are a minority in the overall population, at least I think they are (/checks under bed and in closet). However, in a small pool they can easily form a temporary majority. The reason why I bring up this "corner case" is that I believe we are actually living it right now.

As for solutions, I think smoothing the rewards over a varying number of blocks found would make it impossible to know the dimensions and boundaries of a "round". That would make it very hard to hop effectively unless the hoppers knew the algorithm and inputs to the smoothing function. The issue is that the reward for the block is arbitrary with respect to the work completed.

Averaging over a varying (random) number of rounds just makes your payouts completely random as well - no need to hop there, because such a strange scheme won't get any miners in the first place I hope...

Also you're trusting a PRNG and/or security by obscurity this way - if someone manages to find out your algorithm or breaks into your server and gets the RNG seed, he'll be rich. Also there's no way to really verify if this person is cheating then or just lucky - as the payout function is random.

If you feel the need to be paid something for each share, either mine on an PPS pool, on a geometrically scored one (though the payout there might be VERY low on early shares on long rounds) or take a lesson or 2 in statistics and go PPLNS or double geometric.

It does not make the payments random. If I combine the shares for two consecutive blocks and combine the rewards for the blocks and then only distribute the reward (and the information about the second round starting) after both blocks have been found, hoppers should not be able to take advantage of the start of the round for the second block. The total rewards to each miner will be identical, the information is hidden until it cannot be acted upon.


So, someone breaks into my server and instead of just transferring the thousands of bitcoins sitting in the wallet, they take my random number seed? Also, obscuring data until it is no longer actionable is not "faux security", The data will eventually be available to all, this is the nature of bitcoin. Delaying the dissemination until it is useless to hoppers removes the piece of data they require in order to function, namely the point in time a new round starts. Again, the payout function is not random, the reporting and aggregation period for payouts is.


PPLNS where N varies is almost exactly what I proposed. Except N varies according to the number of shares in some number of solved blocks.

3. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others!

If the number of blocks that get combined is constant, you're hoppable and if it is random, payouts will be random too.
Combining 2 blocks in 1 round is the same as having 1 round that pays 100 BTC. Also you want to improve security for miners by taking information away from them - not a very good approach in my opinion.

I personally would NEVER let thousands of Bitcoin sit in a wallet on an online server, especially not on one that is also acting a s a pool server. I hope pool operators don't do this too.
If the aggregation period is random, you have "mega rounds" of let's say randomint[1,10] rounds paying 50-500 BTC at once. This will lead to more or less random payout intervals (and until the next round has finished, you can't even tell your miners how much they have earned!). In the end you require far more trust and provide far less information than any pool operator could that just uses a hopping proof payout algorithm.

If you let N vary in PPLNS, you make it hoppable unless you also score shares according to difficulty.
(Prop for example is a special case of PPLNS where N = amount of shares that were submitted since the last block was found)

Yes if it means you make more than the people who just stay and mine in one spot, that is the assertion my guess is that people wrap a bunch of moralizing into whatever definitions they are using - perhaps unbeknownst to themselves.  That said JoelKatz who appears to be the prolific poster (in this thread) of said position and he's kind of...well...bad...at defining his terms we can never really know for sure.

Coming from someone who doesn't understand the purpose of definitions, that's almost a compliment.

So do tell...what is the purpose of all definitions?

While I wouldn't be quite as arrogant as to pre-suppose the universal case.  I'd say that when I talk to people, especially when I argue with them.   My point is that they clearly understand my terms.  This is often evidenced by some kind of "back and forth" - sort of like a handshakes used in telecommunication protocols.  I should be able to use a term, they should be able to use it back in a context that make sense for them and I should be able to agree (or sometimes expand on it).

So am I to take your statement to mean that what I said above is not the purpose of definitions in some moderately more general sense of cited context?  That you have some great counter argument?

If not, I can easily show where I do this...and where you don't.

To point a person towards the concept that a word names.

Pool hopping is the right of free speech and the right to peaceably assemble.   You may not like what pool hoppers do but they have a right to do it.

Fair enough.  So it seems like you've kind of proved my point.  If a definition serves merely as the barest of guideposts and especially when addressing a specific audience it's goal is not to result in  a mutually understood term .  Then you are providing what I (and perhaps others) would call a poor definition.

So yeah.  You're bad at it.*

QED baby.

*Unless of course you meant that a mutually understood term is the goal and just said it badly...which also demonstrates my point.  ;D

What is the definition of pedantic?  ;D

Kinda depends, that word without looking it up probably has at least three pretty distinct senses.   None appear to apply here.   What made you think it did?

So here is the question. I had a potential customer to my mining contracts ask about a pool hopper in which I said no. But, if I am renting a VPS, and he wants to run a pool hopper, should I allow it?

i don't see why not.

I was referring to definition number two: overly concerned with minute details or formalisms
I thought it might apply to a discussion in which two people are arguing over the definition of the word definition.  ;)

If he promises not to hop polls that have an explicit prohibition on pool hopping, I'd say your responsibility is sufficiently indirect that you're not a bad person if you allow him to do it. You are perfectly justified in saying "no" if he doesn't promise to stick to only pools that explicitly allow hopping though.

The other thread is long and full of meandering and not on-topic posts. If you want an intro to what pool hopping is and why it works, you could try this blog post (http://hoppersden.info/entries/20-How-to-hop-5-Back-to-basics) although it does require some active reading.

Also, try this game (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=47411.msg567737#msg567737) which might give you an idea of what's going on if you have the time to play with it.

Otherwise, the short story is you aren't at risk at a hopper proof pool. The best known are double-geo pools (like eclipse mc),PPLNS pools (eg mineco.in), SMPPS pools and variants (arsbitcoin, bitpit, eligius) and pure PPS pools (deepbit PPS).

Agreed.

Just to clarify, if you use a pool with a proportional reward system and you do not hop you are losing out (possibly by as much as 20%), even if said pool pretends to stop pool hopping by hiding statistics.  I would recommend a simple PPS pool with low variance for a beginner as it's easy to understand and carries pracitcally no risk and instead usually comes with a heavy fee (deepbit PPS for example), however if you are prepared for higher variance (high variance in absolutely no way affects your expected return; you just have to have the mental strength to be able to mine for a few days and receive nothing sometimes) then you can get a much better return elsewhere.

One thing worth mentioning is a new kind of mining called 'merged mining'.  This has been available for a few days now and few pools are using it.  Using it gives you namecoins for free as you mine bitcoins (at the moment this provides an income bonus of a little over 30% but expect this to fall in the coming weeks).  There are a few pools which use merged mining such as slush's pool so have a look for 'merged mining' on the forum if you're interested (namecoins can easily be traded for bitcoins).  Again, if you don't intend to hop, it is highly recommended that you choose a hopping-proof pool.

eligius.st - merged mining with SMPPS.  hop-resistant (technically hoppable but with limited effect) and with fairly low variance.

simplecoin.us - merged mining with PPLNS.  hop-proof and has a big promotion but with higher variance (shamelessly recommended because it's the pool I use and I want others to join so I get lower variance ;D).

Pro tip:  Sometime soon the Namecoin difficulty is going to fall sharply and at this time merged mining will provide approximately double the income of a normal Bitcoin pool.  This period will last for 2016 Namecoin blocks.

teukon - just thought I'd mention that SMPPS pools can be hopped to reduce payback time, at least in simulation anyway. It won't increase your total payout, but will reduce the amount you are owed at any point in time.

As far as I can tell there are no strategies to optimise payments for double-geo and PPLNS.

Man!  I should really trust my instincts.  Thanks for this!

I actually drafted that last post and said that I wasn't 100% sure that SMPPS was hop-proof but changed my mind because it looked like I was promoting my favourite pool too much and who was I to tell people that there might be a hopping problem with a reward system designed to be hop-proof!

Yes, it is definitely suspicious and I'm glad to have a little confirmation on this from someone that really knows what they are talking about.  I'm simply too busy to look at all the reward systems carefully and evaluate them mathematically (I reject unnecessarily complicated and inelegant systems out of hand).

The double-geo that I remember coming across a while ago on the other hand feels very much like a mathematically sound reward system.  I'm afraid I haven't looked into this in detail either but I'd be very surprised to learn that the double-geo reward systems have a hopping problem, at least with certain parameters fixed.

PPLNS is absolutely solid for a fixed N.  It is quite possible that a pool is varying N with time (as difficulty changes) in a naive way which would allow some mild hopping opportunities but I expect most PPLNS pool operators would make any changes to N gracefully (possibly accepting a bit of risk to themselves).  The same problems could be faced by starting and ending a PPLNS pool (a naive implementation will be a trapezoid scheme but a graceful one will avoid this).

Honestly though, my instincts tell me that most of the reward systems out there, even though hoppable, are perfectly fine to use (very few hop them correctly and make very little for their efforts anyway).  The proportional reward system is to be avoided though.  It is very hoppable and a 24/7 miner will lose out in a big way.

Just start at EclipseMC first. Then go to mining school. You'll be safe at EclipseMC, and the payout system has low variance. Plus the owner is a nice guy, responds to requests quickly and has been thoroughly honest.

PPS - Pay per Share. If the difficulty is 1,000 and the block reward is 50btc, each share is worth .05 BTC.  The pool op takes the hit on variance. They take the gain from the short rounds and hope it's enough to pay out the loss on longer rounds.

PPLNS - Pay per last N shares.  Pool hoppers profit by getting in on the beginning of a new round on a proportional pool hoping to get shares in on a short round.  By paying by the last N shares, hoppers lose their edge by having their early-round shares becoming worthless after N shares have passed since their last submitted share.

SMPSS - Simple Maximum PPS. Like PPS, but keeps a log of who submitted what share when, and pays out only a maximum of the equal PPS shares. Example: On a normal PPS, (at a difficulty of 1000 and reward of 50), you'd get .05 BTC/share regardless of if that round is solved in 5 shares or 5000 shares, but a series of unlucky blocks can wipe out server funds, and then you have a dead pool. On SMPPS though if the server funds ever become less than what needs to be paid out, miners are only paid their share of what's available - and when shorter rounds are solved (thus the pool fund gains a surplus), miners are compensated for their previous under-paid work. This method alleviates the pool op of a lot of risk, while also ensuring that in the event unlucky rounds deplete pool funds that miners will be compensated.

And yeah, double-geo is new to me haha

Summary of mining pool reward systems (https://bitcoil.co.il/pool_summary.pdf)
Analysis of Bitcoin pooled mining reward systems (https://bitcoil.co.il/pool_analysis.pdf) (work in progress)

You yourself made the error of including SMPPS in a list of "hopper proof" methods.

Lie-in-wait. But no, assuming the attacker has no posterior knowledge of future blocks and that the atomic action is finding a share and submitting it to a pool of choice, double-geom and unit-PPLNS provably cannot be optimized.


SMPPS was "designed to be hop-proof" by someone who hasn't got a clue what he's talking about. I've explained why it's broken until I went blue in the face ever since it was spawned.

Way ahead of you, see links above.

You can change the parameters, but you'll need to either modify the scores or using an invariant scoring in the first place.

No it's not. To be absolutely solid you need to use the "unit-PPLNS" variant (to which I refer in my PPLNS post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=39832.0) simply as "the correct method").

The correct way to end a PPLNS pool is to immediately pay out the expected values of outstanding scores.

I don't think that's true. slush and SMPPS should be avoided. ESMPPS might sort of work out ok. There are very good hopping-proof methods so there's no justification to settle for anything less.


Shared Maximum PPS.

Thank you very much for this treasure trove of information!  As I said, I've not had time to look at these methods carefully but have been operating mainly on instinct.

I'm very interested to read about unit-PPLNS and why PPLNS for a fixed N is flawed.  As I'm writing this I'm realising that when I fixed N I somehow fixed difficulty in my mind too.  It seems that given the lag involved in PPLNS (when N is greater than 1) that miners could take advantage of changes in difficulty to hop the pool (I'm fairly sure this could be easily patched up).  If the flaw with non-unit PPLNS with fixed N is nothing to do with difficulty changes then that is fascinating and I hope to learn something new. :)

Such a shame.  I wonder how they managed to convince themselves that their reward system was good.  I must admit that when I first read this reward system it seemed bad (just as with BitMinter and it's shift system).

Agreed.  I just meant to suggest that changing the parameters without due care can change the expected values of certain shares in a way might be exploited by hoppers.  I'm almost certain that some PPLNS pools are sufficiently careless about this.


Hmm...  Again I'm operating on instinct so I'm happy to stand corrected by someone who's done the work.  When I read SMPPS it felt as though the severity of pool hopping would be significantly reduced (compared to proportional) but I could easily be wrong here.  "perfectly fine to use" is perhaps a little strong but I only mean to suggest that if you restrict yourself to only "correct" reward systems then you must reject almost every pool in existence.  When selecting a pool with low variance it is more helpful to know which of the pools have less of a hopping problem (factoring in: the percentage hoppers can ideally expect; preventative measures bought in by the pool such as hiding information and banning hoppers; and the difficulty in hopping it).  Personally I'm interested in using correct reward systems and don't mind high variance.

How have I gone this long here without discovering this information?

I've skimmed through some of the material you have and learnt a lot.  I'm disappointed that the difficulty changes are exactly the problem with PPLNS for fixed N as I was hoping for some cool new probability fact.  To me, the essential idea behind PPLNS is solid but one does have to be careful when changing parameters (here, both N and difficulty are parameters and I completely overlooked difficulty as a parameter in my original post :-[).  I'll read your method for coping with adjustments of these parameters but I'd guess there's only one way of doing it.  I have so little time these days for this kind of fun (1.25 am here) but reading your work is certainly not a waste of my time.

I think it has something to do with falling for the myth that score-based methods penalize intermittent miners, then starting a holy crusade stating that any method is good as long as it's not score-based. And, the vulnerabilities of SMPPS are different and subtler than of proportional.

Actually a shift system can work. I've discussed here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=39832.0) how to do it correctly.

Oh, it's reduced all right, in a sense. The hopper can't get more than 0-fee PPS out of it, and the honest miners' losses depend on the long-term dynamics and usually come in the form of increased maturity time rather than reduced expectation.

I'd say fixed-N PPLNS is good enough in practice. That opens up quite a few options, such as MMC. And you have some great, even if small, double-geom pools such as EclipseMC and yourbtc.

Sorry, making up new probability laws is beyond my powers. :)

Yeah, what was up with that?  Why would weighing shares to given them all the same expected value hurt intermittent miners?  Where do people get these ideas from?

I don't doubt that, it just felt at first glance that it was an attempt to reduce server workload.  The high complexity was very off putting and it felt like it would require some careful patching and scaling to be unhoppable.

I'll look into these.  Right now I would not switch from even variable N PPLNS to double-geom if it meant giving up merged mining (obviously as it's about 2.4 times a profitable right now) but if there is a merged mining double-geom pool out there (sensible parameters) with a solid server and a reputable and attentive operator then I'd send it half of my hashing power and have it as a backup for the other half.

Also, Meni, we are far off topic here.  This thread is supposed to be a flame war about the ethics of pool hopping, not a place for intelligent discussion on the mathematics of alternative reward systems.  We are very much in danger of being branded trolls!

LOL :D  :D :D
those kids are probably considered "unethical" to their neighbors.

I started a new proportional mining pool at http://www.tntmining.com/.  If anyone is interested in helping us out getting started.  I am offering a 3 btc bonus to who ever finds a block between now and Christmas.  12/25/11