Bitcoin Forum

Since hijacking a pool support thread will just make everybody confused when support starts to mix with discussion, please discuss the accusations made here.

theGECK, thanks, I'll respond as I'll have free time (I have to fix payments now and run tx fix on stage, so probably tomorrow). I have (of course) strong evidence that this post is completely wrong, but I have to solve problems as they are going. As I'm scamming the pool all the time, I hope that few hours more to respond does not make a difference :-).

I was just about to create then saw you beat me to it.  I think it was a good idea editing out the finger as well.  Best to keep it focused more on facts not feelings.

Plus, the finger would just add to the wall of text.

I'm unqualified to deal with this, as I keep getting confused with blockexplorer and tracking coins from one place to the next. I don't know how y'all do it, but it amazes me. I am looking forward to this though, and hoping I can learn more about how bitcoin transactions work "under the hood".

Same here I'm REALLY trying to figure it out but am literally getting a headache.

Well, slush himself at one point indicated why a block number on the stats page would be one off from the actual block number it became.  This was caused by two instances of bitcoind returning two different current block numbers, if I remember correctly.

Block 114706 was found by Tycho's Pool at DeepBit.net.

On Deepbit's statistics page, it is listed as:

Time = 23.03.2011 17:40:09
Found In = 2h 09m
Shares = 104786


Edit: The simple explanation that fits Occam's Razor is that all of the "anomalies" that TheTruthHurts raises are just different instances of the same acknowledged bug (that even TheTruthHurts believes to be a bug in some of the anomalies) and that the reason for the coincidence of the "missing" blocks always going to the same Address is because they were solved by Tycho's pool which accounts for ~10%+ of the network's entire hashing strength.

+1

Hey Slush,

I'm inclined to believe you are honest for a number of reasons, but I don't know you personally, so I have to allow for the possibility that there might be some amount of scamming going on even though it seems unlikely.

Imagine now that this payout problem will take multiple days to fix (hopefully it won't, but just imagine). At what point do you start paying out bitcoins manually to your biggest miners just to prove that you are honest?

If you don't have a date you will commit to when you would start doing that, then it begins to look much more suspicious.

Alternately, are you willing to put up a large number of BTC as collateral to a forum member that everyone trusts until the current problem is over?

Thanks for your work running the pool. I'm sure this will all be over soon and everyone will feel silly for doubting you. People just get paranoid and emotional whenever money is involved.

Slush made this post earlier in the pool's thread regarding payments:

(just adding this thread to my watchlist)

Well, to be honest, I don't understand all your claims clearly, which is probably problem of my poor english. I'll try to explain a bit:


Yes, I didn't found a block for a while. Why? Because I'm probably unlucky and also I'm disconnecting my rig pretty often because of Long Polling testing.

This wallet is not mine. That explain a lot - the wallet balance is absolutely unrelated to my mining ;). You probably found them from link to blockexplorer on pool stats page. Two comments to this:

a) I explained in the pool thread before that there is bug in block number detection in stats page. Again: It's because I'm using many bitcoind instances. When one instance found a block and I ask another instance for current block number, it can give me incorrect answer. It isn't critical and I have too much work to do before fix it.

b) Why I should point stats page to stolen blocks?


Lol, I remember to the h00ters post, but I took it as fun. I really didn't mentioned that somebody will take it seriously and start such investigation ;).


Erm, why I should, as a scammer, stop scamming all of you when somebody just call me a scammer? as far as I remember, h00ters didn't tell any reason, maybe except it was unusually long round at the moment or whatever. This don't make a sense for me.


OK, I'm sending payments again (not automatically, with some delay, but it is working). You are saying that I cannot have technical troubles, right? Join us on #bitcoin-dev or watch the logs, you'll see all details about my troubles and how I'm solving that. There is nothing magical, I'm using bleeding edge bitcoin with custom changes, it may happen. You can ask m0mchil or jgarzik, two well respected guys about specific troubles which I had with payments. Again, it did not affect mining, I didn't lost single coin. You're doing problem from something which is not related to possible scam at all.


I many times claimed that pooled mining IS vulnerable from side of cheating operator and it IS trivial to scam. But nobody will do it in the way as you proposed, because he must be an idiot to scam like this. For example, there is no reason to collect all stealed blocks under one mining account, there is no reason to show those stealed block in stats and ABSOLUTELY no reason to make this mining account as top miner :-D. If you want, come to Prague, I'll show you my mining rigs (http://mining.bitcoin.cz/media/img/miner.jpg) (this is old version of the first one, I have two like this).


Ok, it's your opinion. Only me know the truth if I'm stealing blocks or not. So it is pointless to say anything to you; looks like you're convicted that I'm the biggest scammer around. But I hope that I explained a lot to see that IF I'm stealing blocks, I'm DEFINITELY not doing it this way.

Rather than wasting all this bandwidth discussing who is cheating whom, why not try each pool for one week and see where you get the largest payout? 

because it wont work that way  - it all strongly depends on luck (and difficulty - which will change again in 102 blocks)
it should be similar, but there is way too many factors to decide that way

i'm using at least two different pools all the same time just to be sure that i don't have to take any immediate action when one is going off-line,
plus - that will lower the loses in case of potential scam (by pool operator) too

personally i don't think any of the pool operators is a scammer, and even if - people that have enough skills to set up successfully running pool are not retarded and not giving all that "evidence" straight to one's hands

This is when the blocks were confirmed and paid out.  That is different from when the block is found. 

Block 114425      (2011-03-21 17:00:59)
Block 114557      (2011-03-22 17:13:51)
[h00ters post]      (2011-03-22 17:46:38)
Block 114706      (2011-03-23 17:39:59)

Not a pool block, where did you find this?


It's pool block, but your timestamp is bad, did you recalculate it for your timezone?

Time difference between BlockExplorer and pool stats (both UTC) is 13 seconds. Keep in mind that the timestamps are not identical. Block timestamp is from time when block was created (by getwork()), but pool stats are when the block was reported.


Not a pool block.

Sorry, maybe I totally missed your evidence, but I don't understand what exactly happen.

I thought about this some last night, and I am completely convinced that slush is not stealing blocks.

Why? Because that would be an incredibly stupid way to rip off people, and he is obviously not incredibly stupid.

If he wanted to rip people off, all he has to do is give himself more shares in the pool. He could make a ton of money and it would be completely unprovable. The only way you could even detect that kind of fraud is if a large group of miners were closely watching their payout over time versus expected payout, and comparing notes. Even then, it could never arise above a strong suspicion.

If slush wants more money, he can get it easily, and we'll probably never be the wiser. All you can do is watch your payouts and make sure they seem proportional to your processing power over time.

There is NO WAY he would steal whole blocks when he can rip us off by crediting himself extra shares so easily.

If he is truly evil, he could also rip us off by just stopping payouts, claiming technical difficulty, and waiting to see how many bitcoins he makes before people give up on getting their bitcoins out of the pool. I was starting to worry yesterday that just such a scenario might be unfolding. Now that payouts have started again, I feel bad for doubting him, and I sent him a small donation which I hope will help make up for that.

I just want to say one thing, people in charge of pools are providing a service and charging for it , while mining as well , they will make more many than 99% of the mining community... that is all.

Here is my own theory of how slush could be cheating:

First, Slush claims that there is a spam transaction problem.
Then he announces that his pool will no longer be processing transactions that don't include a fee.
So who gets all the fees? Slush is!
Maybe it is slush who is sending all those spam transactions to encourage more fees.
As far as I know, Slush is the only pool operator who does not process free transactions, so he is the one who is profiting the most.

Now let me say that I do NOT actually believe that he is doing this. I trust Slush when he says that there is a spam problem and that his ban on free transactions is temporary. But it is something to think about....

First, I am not sure it is appropriate to single out Slush in particular with these cheating accusations. The truth is that we as miners have no idea whether the pool operators cheat save comparing expected payouts and even that is subject to luck. I have personally moved away from pools because of this very thing along with the fact that when a pool goes down for whatever reason, hashrate goes to 0 with the possibility of not restarting properly. Solo mining eliminates all doubt.
The only way I could see a pool potentially working is if it were private and shared among people who actually had a real physical trust relationship.

BTCMine is also limiting zero transaction fees due to the flood problem. http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4251.msg71231#msg71231

Anyone else monitor http://www.bitcoinmonitor.com/ ?  I've seen the flooding happen and have wondered, What's going on?

I accept that you write that only as theoretical possibility, but I'll still response to this.


The problem is real, people on #dev channel measured that processing block with 1000 spam tx on the network can block bitcoind for more than 3 seconds every 60 seconds. With current rate between 500-1000 requests/second on the pool, it is up to 3000 getwork requests timeouted or flooding servers (especially the retries from side of miners). So this is well documented problem of bitcoin client and many smart people are working on solution right now.


I noticed this in #dev channel week ago, that spammer press all people to pay fees. Actually you can search blockchain that I spent many BTC (maybe more than received) on transaction fees for sending rewards than received from the network (yes, I paid 0.01 fee even for 0.01 payout from the pool). If I'm the spammer, I could implement sendmany few days before I started spamming to save all fees for me. I implemented the sendmany as the (delayed) response for paying fees, which is quite strong evidence that I'm not a spammer :).


Well, others have strong limits on accepting free transactions, too (there is limitfreerelay switch in new bitcoind). As I was probably the first person who had to solve that and I didn't know about this switch, I solved it quite radically. I'm compilling new bitcoind with limitfreerelay support right now, so the limited support for the transactions will be back today.

By the way, transactions with fees have always higher priority than free txes, so other pools/miners also accept paid tx with the priority over free one. By cutting nonfree transactions I actually don't improve the fee income. So there is no other motivation than solve technical difficulties with many second freezes on the pool.


OK, I just explained it a bit :).

There are people who find funny that "they can" hurt the Bitcoin. Actually flood the network is two-line bash script, for example. It can be done by 10-year bored children. We cannot do anyting with spamming itself, so we have to invent some methods to live with that.

Thank you, Slush, for your explanation.

That is what I like about you. You have the ability to calmly respond to accusations without getting upset.
As I said, I didn't actually think you where doing this, it was purely theoretical.
Out of all the pool operators, it is you and Tycho that I trust the most.

a bit off topic, but a friend of mine whomped up a bit of perl which automatically switches to solo mining (or a different pool if you like) if it the pool has gone down, then regularly checks the pool and reconnects once it is back up.  best of both worlds.

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4202.0

As long as slush has his own personal miners connected to the pool he has a conflict of interest, as does any pool operator. It is kind of like a market-making trading bank dealing in the same the pool with their clients. They have an advantage and are directly competing with their clients.

Not to say that slush is doing anything wrong, just that there is a conflict of interest there, as there is with any pool operator who has their own miners connected to the pool. As long as that is the case the suspicions will remain, but if the situation is spelled out and transparent it diffuses it to some degree.

I don't see the conflict of interest in this case.

There is no way for Slush to give preferential treatment to his miners (other than give himself unearned shares which he could do without any miners anyways) that would increase his overall mining earnings.

Any preferential treatment that he might possibly be able to give his miners would probably decrease the effective hashrate of the other miners in the pool which would reduce the total power of the pool as a whole which would be a detriment to Slush's own mining income and lower what he makes off of the pool's fees.

Well firstly the conflict of interest is a separate question as to whether he has the means to act on it and you've conflated the two.

The conflict of interest is clear. If I and you are competing as miners on the bitcoin network, then you and I and slush are all competing as miners on slush's pool. We all have an interest to do as well as we can out of slush's pool venture. Yet only slush operates the pool, the conflict of interest is clear.

As to mechanisms, I think the easiest way would be for the pool operator to set it up so that the pool accepts his miners shares that been calculated with a difficulty less than 1 and just skim a little by producing more shares for less work. Would be very hard to detect without having access to the pool operators code.

Giving himself "fake" shares won't work because people would notice their lowered average earnings if he takes too much.
And there is no point in taking few because it's not worth playing with people's trust.

Being honest is more profitable :)

Something I strongly believe, and see happening over and over around me.

Now seriously guys, Why would slush cheat the pool? Sure, he'd make a quick 5kBTC instantly, but then POOF goes his pool forever and noone would ever join his pool again,

VS

Stay in the pool he owns and gradually make Way more BTC's just by waiting and mining

you can probably skim up to 5% without the majority of people noticing.

In a tight community of trust like this, all it takes is one person noticing and posting about it here on the forums with proof.

Isn't 5% the official cut, disclosed from the start?

Slush's pool charges a 2% fee.

In slush's pool it's 2%.  (1 BTC for every 50 generated.)

Ah, ok, imust've been thinking of another pool, or simply didn't remember it accuratly.

It is strange that in the sake of fairness payout get less & less

Seems if i'm not watching my machines found nothing in that round
If they did it got devalued to next to nothing
ya I'm small time
used to get .015-.20 per day
before they LOWERED  difficulty
now .05 is a good day

avgering out is BS
Why did my machines get all their results early
and I never get one at the end

Let's consider the possibilities:

1. slush hates you, and is cheating you.  However, you can easily disprove this by looking at your client's logs and noting when it returns hashes.

2. Your deity hates you, and is causing you to be unlucky.  Blood sacrifices should fix that.

3. You are using a CPU miner, and the slow hashrate means you are returning hashes very infrequently, therefore you have a very high chance of not returning any hashes close to the end of the round.  Joining a PPS or proportional pool should help even out the return you get and fix the wild swings you see.

Let Occam's razor decide...

Oh, I just found a mistake in the pool source, bobr:


soory, it's fixed now :)

Disclaimer: this is a joke

4 WTF it worked before

5 you are a troll


I vote number 5

sorry slush was not ment to slam u
just bad luck I guess

fyi the disclaimer didn't show till i tried to answer

I find it very amusing that you call me a troll and then essentially agree with my post. :D

That's the problem
you are a Troll  ... contribute nothing useful to the discussion
then you draw your own conclusion

I DID NOT agree with you

My answer was to Slush ...  not to you .... you still are troll ... non contributor to the problem
you took my answer to slush and tried to turn it / use it for your benefit / purpoise
TROLL

can you get that ???

He is not a troll by anymeans, he is clearly contributing to the argument/conversation Dont turn this thread into a flame war Nobody needs it
TrollsTrollingTrollsTrollingTrollsTrollingTrolls

So...this isn't a discussion about slush's pool payout methods and the best ways to maximize payout by minimizing luck based reward strategies.

I think that the accusations given by truthHurts have been discounted by everybody. Sound like a good summary?

I wouldn't exactly say it's been "discounted" per se, as I see no solid evidence aside from a denial has been presented to discount the claims... but thats merely arguing semantics :)... it seems the discussion is essentially over though, if thats what you mean.

TruthHurts's main evidence was based on bug in blocknum (on stats page) and then on tracing wrong wallets in blockexplorer. The fact that my miner didn't find a block for few days isn't any evidence at all :).

I think I said pretty solid reasons why I'm not stealing blocks, at least not in proposed way. Also, as many people can see, not only my pool has problem with detecting block numbers ;). So this discussion is definitely over for me.

I was just being a smartass...  ;)

Since everything that people want to say has been said, I'm going to lock the thread.