Bitcoin Forum

Hey guys,
I've heard of bitminers getting banned off pools for having too many clients hooked up to them.
Is this true? What is the policy of bitmining in a pool? I have an MSP Software that I could use to connect nearly a thousand PCs to a pool and start mining. Well, granted they are shitty PCs. I'm going to have to stick to LiteCoin for the most part:P

What's the deal? Would I get banned for this?

If I were a pool-op and someone called "digital2ape" suddenly initiated many hundreds of connections and requests from PCs across the globe, I would assume it was a DDoS attack, not a friendly botnet.

Hahaha. So botnets are allowed???

There are a few individuals that have had massively parallel computer resources legitimately under their control, leased power, etc. that made it profitable for them. However, it will cause problems for pools to service many low-efficiency miners using thousands of TCP/IP ports. You would be best to contact the pool to set up specific IPs to connect to.

However, almost anyone with hundreds of CPU miners is doing something bad that will likely get them fired (http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2009/11/30/20091130searchforaliens1202.html). CPU mining uses much more power than it generates in Bitcoins, so it is likely unauthorized computer use or a botnet.

How would they see my name digital2ape on hundreds of computers? Is it because all the set-up accounts lead to the same BitWallet? Hundreds of them will be under the same IP, and hundreds of others won't. I was under the impression that each PC would have their own seperate user account in the pool. Is there a master account they all link to?

I don't know of all pools, but of all I've been on, you have a master account you control (this is where all the BTC/LTC/ETC goes -- pool ops typically hold the money in your master account until you request a withdrawal to a wallet), and then you have workers (sometimes referred to as "slaves") which are the PCs. However, I don't believe there's any reason you couldn't just have all mining clients point to the same worker. You could start your own mining server, but then all of your "legitimate-use PCs" would point somewhere specific and possibly associated to you, a legitimate user.


Typically, the scheme to connect to a server in your mining client (this varies both by mining client and pool) accountname_workername@pool.com:8080, and then a person creates a different worker for each PC, or each GPU, or each CPU, or whatever they want -- but AFAIK, that's just for the purpose of measuring performance of each component. You could start an account on a pool with just one worker and point all of the mining clients to the same worker/slave account.

Thanks man! I really appreciate your consultation, I should be paying you!

Thanks thanks thanks.

Having them all point to the same worker will definitely be easier to configure.

If you have that many clients, you should really be operating your own pool, or a proxy that uses a single connection, or something.