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.

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.

That doesn't really make any sense. A transaction is confirmed in blocks, and as I see it there is no differentiation between one that pays and one that does not. Unless the discoverer of a block can explicitly state "I don't want to confirm a transaction unless it pays me > xx  BTC in fees" then all transactions will get confirmed at the same rate. Is that the case?

lots of people paying transaction fees. ACtually it looks like one person in particular move a ton of coins and paid a fee on each movement. Probably forgot to change his tx fee setting (paid almost 10% of the moved coin to fees).

I'm a little unsure as to why anyone would ever pay a fee.

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.

Ah, I guess the article I was reading misquoted the number of SPs, that'd make sense then.

Was browsing around at cards, and noticed the specs for the radeon 6770 lists it as having 320x4 stream processors clocked at 900MHz at default. This compared to say a 5870 which has 320x5 stream processors clocked at 850MHz. As I've been told that SPs are more or less what makes the hash happen, a quick calc puts a 6770 at 80% of the hashing power of a 5870, or around 330MHash/sec. Why then is it that it looks to be pulling barely 200MHash/sec from the hardware lists?

Probability	Time
Average	280 days, 4 hours, 32 minutes
50%	194 days, 5 hours, 5 minutes
95%	839 days, 8 hours, 54 minutes

Well, it'll be interesting to see if you manage to keep this up until you find a block.

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.

Well that's a fair point. But as I said it's all a very complex mishmash. It is much more difficult for difficulty to decrease than increase. Once you have invested into bitcoin you are invested. If you are making $5 that's still $5 you are making. And the fact is that mining is still ridiculously profitable. Even after all the difficulty increases I see about 1000 USD profit per month off 5GHash in possibly the most electrically expensive area in the country. If I weren't electrically limited I'd be boosting the difficulty up myself. There's simply no reason to see difficulty drop right now. In fact if it weren't for the volatility of bitcoin scaring investors from plopping money into it, and the zero-sum aspect I think you'd see difficulty increasing far faster than it is now even without a price increase, at the current price.

But that still relies on price being the primary motivator, with awareness a subfactor. Difficulty remained relatively constant for the first year and a half or so because both awareness was low, and price was nonexistant. People added value to the coin without exchanges though, there was a thriving "over the counter" trade system created, and this combined with more awareness of the coin caused more people to get on board, raising difficulty.

Aside from the small (now minority) group of enthusiasts who mine bitcoin because they believe in it becoming an eminent player in the world currency, most people playing with mining and trading bitcoin are profit seekers, speculators, and other opportunists, who follow price. And most of the new players who become aware of bitcoin choose to join because of the pricing/profitability.

Basically you will never disentangle price and awareness, but short of a change in human nature as you put it, you will not see awareness be the primary factor in bitcoin mining being taken up. And that's why satoshi constructed it that way in my opinion. To take advantage of human nature.

All my opinion of course.


Just to answer you with some of what I said before, mining is still very very profitable right now. It will have to become about half as profitable as it is today (or about twice as difficult/half the price) before I would find myself squeezed out of mining, and again, that is because I live in literally the most energy expensive area in the united states (its even more costly than many european nations). There is still room for a great deal of growth before people begin to see outlays as being untenable. But yes obviously there is some point in the future where difficulty and expenses meet and you cannot have organic growth at that point.

Well I hate to say this, but it's of course a congruence of multiple factors. For example, if the whole world knew of bitcoin, but the price were still sitting at $14/coin, the difficulty wouldn't be 175,000 times higher than it is today. By the same token if no one new were to find out about bitcoin but the price were to jump to $1000/coin the difficulty probably wouldn't jump 71 times higher than it is now, simply due to physical limitations and capital limitations.

In both cases it would almost definitely be higher, but more often the two are usually linked, such that when price goes up people tell their friends, or when lots of people hop on board its because lots more people have been made aware, bitcoin gets "hyped" and price goes up, both yielding high difficulties.

I would say however that in my personal opinion, price is a stronger motivator for difficulty increase than simply awareness, looked at individually. Just knowing about bitcoin doesn't really motivate most people stuck in a fiat currency system unable to imagine life any other way (most people aren't all that smart), and the minimal profit made per card per day from mining doesn't really inspire many people (Oh I make $15 a day from my triple radeon rig? so what?). But when price takes off both those who are already invested get gold rush fever, and those who hear about magical money making inventions and ridiculous profits for doing nothing want to jump on board.

I could be wrong, but that's how I see it.

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?

Indeed. The current price mechanics for GPUs comes from their MASSIVE volume of sales. I believe the 58xx series sold something like 20 million GPUs (not an exact number, but certainly feasible). So if it costs 50million dollars to contract a fabrication facility to produce their chips, then you can see prices like $200 for a 58xx card on the shelf.

Now if it costs 25million dollars to contract a fab plant (their time is expensive) and you expect to only sell say, 200,000 GPUs to miners, then it's not unreasonable to expect to see prices be thousands of dollars on the shelf, like the firegl cards. Until you see adoption of bitcoin mining on the level of video gaming you won't see cards being optimized for mining at the same prices, and of course then you face the double edged sword of insane difficulty killing that benefit.

grod kinda beat me to it. I'd be happy to lay out 8.5% for both but now I look like I'm copying him

Network growth rate has almost reached a 14day average of 1%/day due to many 3day average of sub1% (and some sub 0%). If no crazy ass price swings happen I see no reason for this trend not to continue. Like grod though, I'm not saying nothing can change, if some big event occurs all that crap goes out the window, which I readily stipulate to.

But for fun we can do 1990576 for block 141120. Your prediction I believe is 2130690 for the median.

 

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.

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 think people overestimate how much mining power was on namecoin. Haven't crunched the numbers myself, but I expect no more than a single terahash. Probably less.

Perhaps you should try and keep up with the statements I made in my short and concise post. I said next target is quite easy to do without any modelling of any kind. I said that the trick is making a model that can forecast farther down the road, and used your forecast as an example of how difficult it can be (Your median was about 70% off actual, and even your lower bound was wrong with a huge error bar).

I applaud your work on creating a method of prediction, but until you stop patting yourself on the back for being right with the easy stuff, I suspect you will have trouble with the hard stuff. An 8% increase still seems much more likely than a > 15% increase. So we'll see, you are predicting a roughly 17% increase for your next median I believe? Let us see who does better, just for fun, no wagers necessary.

Your mathematical model says 17.5% for median, I will say 8.5% based solely on my own observation and "gut feeling". Let us see who does better for the next retarget. I know you argue against hard target exactitude, but that is not the point of this game, merely to show the ease of next retarget checking. And I haven't even really been paying that much attention lately tbqh.

EDIT: 1834633 to be more clear.

EDIT: Found it.

Well I've found a few blocks on deepbit, how about that. I made tycho some good bux

I'm not bummed though, I'm still doing statistically about as well as would be expected otherwise.