@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.

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.

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

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.

Doing anything at all that utilizes your GPU will reduce hashrate. The reduction will be proportional to the amount of GPU power used. This is normal, there are no workarounds it's just the price we pay to mine on anything but a dedicated rig. There are even a few applications (powerpoint is the WORST) that won't even draw their windows at a reasonable rate while mining, I have to turn off my local miner any time I use them.

EskimoBob mentioned in another thread earlier that we might have a better rep if instead of switching to a predetermined backup pool in such downtime, if we switched to whatever pool is on the longest block. Would dedicating JUST the hashes that would've gone to backup to such a pool be seriously detrimental (i.e. bring efficiency below 1) or could this be feasible? If it doesn't hurt anything and I'm just sending those shares to ars/eligius anyway I'd rather help a pool I hop out. It'd give us a better image and make pools more willing to stick with hoppable algos.

Yubikey:

http://www.yubico.com/yubikey

It's an authentication device you can attach to your account - log in with un/pw as normal then plug it in and press a button when prompted. Without the key, you can't log in so a hacker needs a physical device you own in addition to your information.

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.

Indeed, and it works MUCH faster in the IT world than in nature. The people complaining are almost always the ones who can't keep up.

Last thing I remember, I was logging off of TOR... I had to find a way to live with the cash I'd trusted before...

Relax, said Satoshi, they're all built to deceive. You can log off any time you like, but you'll no longer believe!

*plays awesome solo*

DING DING DING! WE HAVE A WINNER!!!

My employer is based in Australia. If the USD crashes I'm pretty sure I have the option to request payment in AUD. Globalization FTW? 

1) Not my project, but I think it's worthwhile so I'm trying hard to help it succeed.

2) We were removed from the main bitcoin.org page some time last week, probably for the exact reasons you specify. StackExchange lends itself to an info-centric and heavily moderated format much better than an open forum, hence why I'm hoping it works better than these forums for certain purposes.

And in the master's chambers, they gathered for the feast...

The "serious place" ship has sailed my friend.

If you want good info and strong moderation, help us get the StackExchange site started:
http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/30763/bitcoin-crypto-currency

It's stagnating and could use some help and strong promotion.

And this is why my fiancee and I each funnel a bit of our expendable income into separate individual checking accounts each month - I don't want to hear "you spent HOW MUCH on video cards?!?" any more than she wants to hear "How the hell much can a purse cost? It's a f***ing BAG!"

In all seriousness though, my fiancee is into bitcoin as well, and is actually the one who found us investors for my mining operations. I'd still be pushing 300 MH/s if it weren't for her efforts (3 GH/s FTW)

I also carry Zimbabwe Dollars and Yugoslav Dinar in my wallet to help explain inflation and fiat currency to random people. I proselytize about bitcoin a lot.

From the article Spruce linked:


So basically... We hold your cash if we feel like it.  

Exactly. We should publicize this heavily as a prime example of why bitcoin > paypal. Arguments like "bitcoin > USD" are tough to argue and require that the audience either know or be taught on-the-spot some basic economic concepts, but showing it to be a better digital payment method than paypal requires none of that and we now have at least one definitive example that doesn't require citing the politically-charged WikiLeaks case.

Congratulations LongMarch, your story just became my new biggest talking point.

What you're describing is a "tangled hierarchy" and it is, in fact, the state of every economic system. Mining has an impact on bitcoin price and bitcoin price has an impact on mining. Many things have an impact on price, and many of those things are more substantial than mining activity - likewise price is not the only impact on mining, though price->mining is a stronger effect than mining-> price.

Among other things, miners produce some 7200 new coins per day - in times of low market movement the influx of new fiat moneys can be less than the face value of the 7200 new coins, and in such markets price tends to decline. This is just one of the many recognizable effects and it is admittedly a minor one that occurs only under limited circumstances.

Anyone who claims that they have the whole of the market "figured out" is either a fool or a liar. There are too many causes and effects and too many unknown ways in which the causes and effects interact, stack, tangle and loop back on themselves. The best we can do is look for indicators of mass market psychology and make educated guesses. Welcome to the wonderful world of economic theory

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"