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Title: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: Cryptoman on April 13, 2011, 07:18:33 PM It seems we've had a sudden increase in network hashing power. Mystery miner returns or people reacting to the rise in value of Bitcoins?
Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: MoonShadow on April 13, 2011, 08:04:40 PM It seems we've had a sudden increase in network hashing power. Mystery miner returns or people reacting to the rise in value of Bitcoins? There is no way to know. Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: purplezky on April 13, 2011, 08:36:36 PM <speculation>
Maybe u2u3 invested in a mining farm and bought some at Mt. gox ? ??? </speculation> http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5613.0 (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5613.0) Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: theGECK on April 14, 2011, 12:28:33 AM Probably both. If I remember right, MM popped up at this price point last time too. So, it is probably some network/company that is only worth mining when the price hits a specific level. That's my theory, at least, that MM is a botnet that requires a certain price point to cover the rent.
Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: ryepdx on April 14, 2011, 11:10:28 PM You know what's interesting? If the Mystery Miner commands a large enough share of the network, they could feasibly drive up the price of bitcoins by holding on to all the bitcoins they mine instead of selling them on the open market. If a sizable share of all the network's bitcoins are going to them, they effectively reduce the overall supply and (potentially) turn people who would have been producers of bitcoins into consumers. This would also increase demand.
Then, once they have a decent amount mined and the price has gone up sufficiently, they could sell them all in a dark pool for a handsome profit. Prices would then plummet, of course. Btw, anyone know where that 30,000 BTC sell-off from last week came from? Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: marcus_of_augustus on April 14, 2011, 11:17:48 PM It needn't be any extra mining but just a lucky streak by the mining network that jacks up calculated hash rates over an extended period. Deepbit.net had an epic day on April 13, solving ~80% more blocks than it normally does ... so for that day the pool's has rate power comes out higher. Similar episodes are likely to occur for the whole network. Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: TiagoTiago on April 14, 2011, 11:19:35 PM Kinda scary to think there is a single person or group with so much power over the Bitcoin economy...
Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: MoonShadow on April 14, 2011, 11:49:34 PM Kinda scary to think there is a single person or group with so much power over the Bitcoin economy... It is only an assumption that the "mystery miner" is a single person or group. That's is actually unlikely. More likely is that what we attribute to intentional action is a statistical outlier, and not any specific event. Even if it is an event, there may be a trigger causing many different users to jump in at the same time, creating the illusion of a single powerful group. Perhaps more than one person has already hacked the mining code to track the price/difficulty ratio, and only burn clock cycles if the ratio is above a certain value. I'm not a coder, but compared to the complexity of the miners themselves, hacking the client to cycle generation on and off based on a simple calculation should be trivial. I just wish whoever has done it would release their code. Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: LZ on April 15, 2011, 12:02:56 AM Deepbit.net had an epic day on April 13, solving ~80% more blocks than it normally does That was my birthday... :DTitle: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: slush on April 15, 2011, 12:31:44 AM It is only an assumption that the "mystery miner" is a single person or group. That's is actually unlikely. Mystery miner was single person and his wallet is tracked already. Please search #bitcoin-dev logs for "MM" or "Mistery Miner". Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: MoonShadow on April 15, 2011, 12:40:21 AM It is only an assumption that the "mystery miner" is a single person or group. That's is actually unlikely. Mystery miner was single person and his wallet is tracked already. Please search #bitcoin-dev logs for "MM" or "Mistery Miner". I don't have access to IRC at work, care to share? Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: slush on April 15, 2011, 12:44:00 AM Wallet for receiving mining funds is http://blockexplorer.com/address/1PT3YvvKnNqT1513Vs9dZ59eU1gq7xQADc. Coins are currently lying here http://blockexplorer.com/address/12YZ8ubTBJHeWRtxFnRpmrgJuxaUv2nCQY
There is no specific IRC log to quote, it's many pieces spread in whole channel history :). Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: fabianhjr on April 15, 2011, 02:45:35 AM http://blockexplorer.com/tx/f03b2e4feb915cc1dd7e226315386f459977d93c2919556fb3de73c83052ce3f#o0 (http://blockexplorer.com/tx/f03b2e4feb915cc1dd7e226315386f459977d93c2919556fb3de73c83052ce3f#o0)
Is that a clue? 2011.44?(4/4/2011) Damn, it cannot be just a coincidence! Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: marcus_of_augustus on April 15, 2011, 02:53:19 AM Interesting, mystery miner is a single entity/machine. Probably a commercial or academic cluster or supercomputer then. Wonder what incentivises them to be on/off the bitcoin network? (Besides having spare cycles). Could be electricity cost, when bitcoin gets economic they crank it up. Certainly puts some punch behind the security of the network having something like that lurking out there ... how many more mystery miners might potentially come out of the woodwork when the price is right? Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: slush on April 15, 2011, 03:03:08 AM Interesting, mystery miner is a single entity/machine. Probably a commercial or academic cluster or supercomputer then. Wonder what incentivises them to be on/off the bitcoin network? (Besides having spare cycles). There are more arguments to think that MM was botnet. One of them is that MM shut it down after few days. 50k BTC is pretty nice result and every day of botnet operation is bigger risk of troubles... Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: Jim Hyslop on April 15, 2011, 04:08:44 AM http://blockexplorer.com/tx/f03b2e4feb915cc1dd7e226315386f459977d93c2919556fb3de73c83052ce3f#o0 (http://blockexplorer.com/tx/f03b2e4feb915cc1dd7e226315386f459977d93c2919556fb3de73c83052ce3f#o0) Probably is. Just dig into each of the input transactions, and you'll see that most of them are older, some of them going back to January. Just someone consolidating all their bitcoins into a single address, I think.Is that a clue? 2011.44?(4/4/2011) Damn, it cannot be just a coincidence! Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: Jim Hyslop on April 15, 2011, 04:11:04 AM It seems we've had a sudden increase in network hashing power. Mystery miner returns or people reacting to the rise in value of Bitcoins? I wouldn't call it sudden. I've been graphing it since the last difficulty change, and it's been a gradual but steady increase. At this point, we seem to be averaging about 600GHash/sec. Which, incidentally, is putting us on course for another decrease of the target.Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: j16sdiz on April 15, 2011, 04:15:12 AM Interesting, mystery miner is a single entity/machine. Probably a commercial or academic cluster or supercomputer then. Wonder what incentivises them to be on/off the bitcoin network? (Besides having spare cycles). There are more arguments to think that MM was botnet. One of them is that MM shut it down after few days. 50k BTC is pretty nice result and every day of botnet operation is bigger risk of troubles... I can't imagine what kind of damage a botnet can do Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: xf2_org on April 15, 2011, 04:30:09 AM I can't imagine what kind of damage a botnet can do It seems likely that most botnet machines would be lower-powered, without capable GPU. So, you'd need a really, really big CPU mining botnet basically... Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: allinvain on April 15, 2011, 10:25:43 PM I can't imagine what kind of damage a botnet can do It seems likely that most botnet machines would be lower-powered, without capable GPU. So, you'd need a really, really big CPU mining botnet basically... But what if the botnet intrustion code was smart enough to search for a suitable GPU (it would not care about mining efficiency so it would go for both ATI and AMD)!! :) Imagine the hashing power such a botnet could achieve. Imagine all those poor games who are left scratching their head wondering why their system lags and why temps spike "myseriously"...:P Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: MoonShadow on April 15, 2011, 11:38:13 PM I can't imagine what kind of damage a botnet can do It seems likely that most botnet machines would be lower-powered, without capable GPU. So, you'd need a really, really big CPU mining botnet basically... But what if the botnet intrustion code was smart enough to search for a suitable GPU (it would not care about mining efficiency so it would go for both ATI and AMD)!! :) Imagine the hashing power such a botnet could achieve. Imagine all those poor games who are left scratching their head wondering why their system lags and why temps spike "myseriously"...:P If it's that smart, then why would it even be noticed by the user? It should be able to throttle the GPU so that it's running just below full fan heat and stop whenever the screensaver dies. Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: marcus_of_augustus on April 15, 2011, 11:57:56 PM I can't imagine what kind of damage a botnet can do It seems likely that most botnet machines would be lower-powered, without capable GPU. So, you'd need a really, really big CPU mining botnet basically... But what if the botnet intrustion code was smart enough to search for a suitable GPU (it would not care about mining efficiency so it would go for both ATI and AMD)!! :) Imagine the hashing power such a botnet could achieve. Imagine all those poor games who are left scratching their head wondering why their system lags and why temps spike "myseriously"...:P If it's that smart, then why would it even be noticed by the user? It should be able to throttle the GPU so that it's running just below full fan heat and stop whenever the screensaver dies. Yet another reason to go to Linux ... botnets could get a lot more virulent if there is palpable money (bitcoin) at the end of the computational theft rainbow. Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: allinvain on April 16, 2011, 03:36:48 AM I can't imagine what kind of damage a botnet can do It seems likely that most botnet machines would be lower-powered, without capable GPU. So, you'd need a really, really big CPU mining botnet basically... But what if the botnet intrustion code was smart enough to search for a suitable GPU (it would not care about mining efficiency so it would go for both ATI and AMD)!! :) Imagine the hashing power such a botnet could achieve. Imagine all those poor games who are left scratching their head wondering why their system lags and why temps spike "myseriously"...:P If it's that smart, then why would it even be noticed by the user? It should be able to throttle the GPU so that it's running just below full fan heat and stop whenever the screensaver dies. Well it's not that easy. People have different configurations with different cooling solutions. What I'm saying is that in order for the botnet code to be that smart it would have to be very complex and have a lot of built in knowledge of different card configurations, etc. It is by far simpler for the code to check "hey is there an OpenCL or CUDA capable card in the system? yes - let it rip! no - use the CPU" Moa has a point. You are less likely to get infected with these on linux. I'm thinking of building a dedicated linux box just to store my bitcoins for that very reason - among many. Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: TiagoTiago on April 16, 2011, 09:42:03 AM I wonder if such an individual starts to pose a clear threat to the regular Bitcoin users, if there will be enough pissed hackers to mount an uber cyberstalking squad and track the down the real person behind the thing...
Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: VPoro on April 16, 2011, 10:25:07 AM First of all, hello everyone, long time stalker but first post here :)
This Mystery miner - would Compute4Cash be a candidate for this? They pay for "WorkUnits", and do not explain what they are used for, the calculations are done with GPU's and they even have a list of WUs/hour for various cards which greatly reminds me of the wiki list for Bitcoin... A brilliant idea from the owner idd if it is; pay people a fraction of what they could be earning with the actual pooled mining and rake in loads of profit for yourself ;p Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: Mahkul on April 16, 2011, 10:32:22 AM I can't imagine what kind of damage a botnet can do It seems likely that most botnet machines would be lower-powered, without capable GPU. So, you'd need a really, really big CPU mining botnet basically... But what if the botnet intrustion code was smart enough to search for a suitable GPU (it would not care about mining efficiency so it would go for both ATI and AMD)!! :) Imagine the hashing power such a botnet could achieve. Imagine all those poor games who are left scratching their head wondering why their system lags and why temps spike "myseriously"...:P Gamers don't usually install SDKs Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: LMGTFY on April 16, 2011, 10:51:35 AM First of all, hello everyone, long time stalker but first post here :) Compute4Cash is mining bitcoins: the site owner eventually came clean (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=4710;sa=showPosts) here on this forum when exposed.This Mystery miner - would Compute4Cash be a candidate for this? They pay for "WorkUnits", and do not explain what they are used for, the calculations are done with GPU's and they even have a list of WUs/hour for various cards which greatly reminds me of the wiki list for Bitcoin... A brilliant idea from the owner idd if it is; pay people a fraction of what they could be earning with the actual pooled mining and rake in loads of profit for yourself ;p Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: allinvain on April 16, 2011, 02:00:43 PM I can't imagine what kind of damage a botnet can do It seems likely that most botnet machines would be lower-powered, without capable GPU. So, you'd need a really, really big CPU mining botnet basically... But what if the botnet intrustion code was smart enough to search for a suitable GPU (it would not care about mining efficiency so it would go for both ATI and AMD)!! :) Imagine the hashing power such a botnet could achieve. Imagine all those poor games who are left scratching their head wondering why their system lags and why temps spike "myseriously"...:P Gamers don't usually install SDKs True! Very good point. I don't think it would be very practical for a botnet/trojan to install an SDK without the user's knowledge, but it still is theoretically possible. Could the SDK not be "trimmed down" somehow? However, if the incentive is great enough I think someone out there will at least seriously attempt to do this. The same people - or type of people - that are responsible for the spam sending trojans/botnets who make millions off of viagra and all kind of shit they spam people with are going to see this as yet another cash cow. As long as it is fairly easy for them to liquidate BTC into whatever national currency they prefer it will be a breeze for them to make money. The thing is this does not really harm bitcoin as a whole, but it does take away in a sense bitcoins from miners that otherwise would've mined them in a more traditional and dare I say "honest" fashion of investing in their own hardware and using their own electricity instead of STEALING it or hijacking it from someone else. Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: Raulo on April 16, 2011, 02:18:53 PM You don't need SDK to mine if you use CAL instead of OpenCL. Catalyst drivers suffice. And even with OpenCL, I believe you only need dynamic libraries not the full SDK suite.
However, you underestimate the number of CPU zombies you can cheaply "rent": http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4783.msg70515#msg70515 Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: allinvain on April 16, 2011, 03:30:29 PM You don't need SDK to mine if you use CAL instead of OpenCL. Catalyst drivers suffice. And even with OpenCL, I believe you only need dynamic libraries not the full SDK suite. However, you underestimate the number of CPU zombies you can cheaply "rent": http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4783.msg70515#msg70515 Jesus...30 mil botnet you can rent! Wow. Ok, now excuse me while I cash out some of my bitcoins, pay that monthly rent and go make back some bitcoins. Lather, rinse, and repeat :P Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: LMGTFY on April 16, 2011, 03:34:56 PM Looking at bitcoin.sipa.be (http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-10k.png), I'm not seeing anything unusual. I can see MM off to the left, but the current part of the graph just looks to me like the usual ups and downs of network growth. Is there something else that makes us think Mystery Miner has returned?
Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: Cryptoman on April 16, 2011, 04:01:15 PM Looking at bitcoin.sipa.be (http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-10k.png), I'm not seeing anything unusual. I can see MM off to the left, but the current part of the graph just looks to me like the usual ups and downs of network growth. Is there something else that makes us think Mystery Miner has returned? I noticed a brief surge to over 1 Terahash/s on bitcoinwatch.com the day I started this thread. It was probably just a string of good luck and got averaged out on the sipa charts. Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: LMGTFY on April 16, 2011, 04:40:19 PM I noticed a brief surge to over 1 Terahash/s on bitcoinwatch.com the day I started this thread. It was probably just a string of good luck and got averaged out on the sipa charts. Cool, thanks. There is a spike on sipa, but it's followed by an equivalent fall. If I'd seen the spike as it was happening I'd have been concerned too!Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: Cryptoman on April 16, 2011, 04:59:11 PM It's Google doing trial runs of Bitcoin mining. They do it for a while and then shut it down, refine their setup and start it back up again. Are you serious? Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: allinvain on April 16, 2011, 05:26:06 PM It's Google doing trial runs of Bitcoin mining. They do it for a while and then shut it down, refine their setup and start it back up again. Are you serious? lol who knows, but don't forget they DID write a java based bitcoin client..well someone from their organization, so I'm not sure if there is a formal "plan" to make bitcoin their next thing. However, let's put it this way, if Google adopts bitcoin in some major way then it's mainstream all the way baby! And rather quickly too! Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: Garrett Burgwardt on April 16, 2011, 05:36:34 PM It's Google doing trial runs of Bitcoin mining. They do it for a while and then shut it down, refine their setup and start it back up again. Are you serious? lol who knows, but don't forget they DID write a java based bitcoin client..well someone from their organization, so I'm not sure if there is a formal "plan" to make bitcoin their next thing. However, let's put it this way, if Google adopts bitcoin in some major way then it's mainstream all the way baby! And rather quickly too! I'm fairly certain that Google the entity has done nothing and probably not even much noticed bitcoins, but one particular employee used his 20% project time to make a bitcoin client. It seems there is widespread belief that Google the corporation cares about bitcoins - all signs point to them not even really knowing about it, or at least not planning on doing anything with it so far. Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: xf2_org on April 16, 2011, 05:56:25 PM I'm fairly certain that Google the entity has done nothing and probably not even much noticed bitcoins, but one particular employee used his 20% project time to make a bitcoin client. It seems there is widespread belief that Google the corporation cares about bitcoins - all signs point to them not even really knowing about it, or at least not planning on doing anything with it so far. +1 agreed Thank you for re-injecting some realism. Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: Raoul Duke on April 18, 2011, 10:42:34 AM It's Google doing trial runs of Bitcoin mining. They do it for a while and then shut it down, refine their setup and start it back up again. Are you serious? Think about it. Google is the biggest company that backs free, open software and culture. Google also happens to more servers than Intel, Rackspace, Microsoft and Amazon combined (http://www.intac.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/most-dedicated-servers.png). If Google wants to use Bitcoin for adsense or whatever they'd need a large supply to fund it. Buying Bitcoin in the mass quantities that Google would need is currently impossible, but since they have many servers to work with it's easier for them to mine it themselves. Once they have their supply, they'll announce their involvement. They can't announce it early because the news that Google is working with Bitcoin would cause the the value of Bitcoin to rise dramatically. If they play their cards rights, they can mine whatever amount they need and when they announce it that amount will be worth 1, 5, 10, 100 or whatever times as much. But mostly I'm just rumour mongering :D Although who else would have the resources to drop that much power into the network at random? Would they be using THIS server architecture to mine? Cause that's all they have in their container DC's... http://www.topdesignmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/GoogleServerMedium.jpg Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: allinvain on April 18, 2011, 10:53:12 AM What that box got? A dual cpu (amd opteron perhaps) with boatload of RAM? I don't think a group of those servers can compare to the power of even a humble 5770.
Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: Raoul Duke on April 18, 2011, 10:57:18 AM What that box got? A dual cpu (amd opteron perhaps) with boatload of RAM? I don't think a group of those servers can compare to the power of even a humble 5770. Well, read the full article, http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html They really have a LOT of them... But that being said, you all must know, and Google themselves admited it, their service was made to work on cheap hardware, that's right CHEAP hardware... and that's what they have. Cheap hardware, but lots and lots of it... ;D Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: allinvain on April 18, 2011, 01:23:21 PM Interesting article. Although it does not give details about what kind of cpu and ram they use I would imagine they aren't wimpy servers .
If google ever build a gpu compute cluster I can see them easily reapplying that cheap but plentiful philosophy -maybe a giant collection of super cheap microatx boards each with a radeon 5770 card or something similarly cheap and power efficient. Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: TiagoTiago on April 19, 2011, 02:14:30 AM I wouldn't consider it being beyond them to actually build farms with cheap purpose built hashing cards
Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: Steve on April 19, 2011, 02:48:32 AM I suspect, if it's a botnet, that whoever is using it has discovered that they can't mine full time and unload everything they mine without significantly pushing the market down. So, they might be mining for a while, until they collect some amount of bitcoins then they switch to something else lucrative while they unload the bitcoins over time...once finished unloading (and perhaps when done with the other activity) they go back to mining again to load back up on bitcoins.
Title: Re: Mystery miner at it again? Post by: allinvain on April 19, 2011, 04:12:36 AM I suspect, if it's a botnet, that whoever is using it has discovered that they can't mine full time and unload everything they mine without significantly pushing the market down. So, they might be mining for a while, until they collect some amount of bitcoins then they switch to something else lucrative while they unload the bitcoins over time...once finished unloading (and perhaps when done with the other activity) they go back to mining again to load back up on bitcoins. Yep you are probably right. Funny how bitcoin is practically a botnet owner's dream - free money! |
