Assume the botnet operator would pay the owners of his bots. Would you, as a miner, still feel like you are being stolen from?
As deepbit said, its only the owners of the machines that are getting robbed. For miners it would make no difference if the botnet operator  rather than stealing computer resources, instead robbed a bank and bought a warehouse full of FPGAs with his loot. Or he actually bought it from his saving account. Makes no difference - except for the bank.

Is that a typo or are you kidding? 460MH nets you less than 10 BTC per month, or ~$45 at the current price. If I had any hopes BTC would increase 4x in a month, Id rather place a bet on bitcoinica .

You should read more carefully. Goat is not paying 116% if you dont mine here 100% of the time. Anyone "hopping" between this pool and gpumax will only get 100% from goat (which makes complete sense, mind you). 

GPUmax is also closer to 40% public work atm, but the math isnt very hard.  0.4 x 150% PPS + 0.6 x 100% PPS = 120% PPS without any hopping at all. So how does one get below 116% for full time miners?

Yes. I only read a few posts in that thread, thats a 100% scam. Developing a full custom asic costs millions of dollars. Anyone begging on this forum to raise that kind of cash is a scammer, period.

That said, its not entirely implausible someone else did produce an asic, like largecoin. But Im fairly confident our MM is just a botnet.

Of course, thats why its "only" 120% currently. AFAIK, public work is still paid at 150% PPS, but its only ~40% of the shares. You should end up with about 120% average per day if you just point your miners to GPUmax and have a zero fee private pool. Unless gpumax prioritizes small miners, but I have never heard of that.


Overhead and server costs are not a reason to refuse miners. If anything youd want more to cover the fixed costs. Refusing miners indicates "per share" losses, which is hard to grasp for me since gpumax alone ought to cover it.

As for hopping, well, fortunately prop pools are indeed a dying breed, but hopping just one prop pool, depending how badly its being hopped, will get you close to that 10% extra already, and its not like there is only 1 pool you can hop.  If you cant get 116% with a gpumax account and hopping, you are doing something wrong.

How do you manage to lose money on this? Even if you just redirect the hashes to GPUmax, you ought to make a small profit, as you currently get ~120% PPS average just from running public jobs. I know its down from it was before, but its still ~120%. If you do any hopping on top of that, its kinda hard to see how youd make less than 130% PPS

I did say "suggest" (ie, the user could always override it, because he can anyway) and "for larger transactions".
Someone sending 1000BTC is not going to switch to western union when he is kindly asked to pay 0.1 BTC fees instead of 0.001. Whether he lives in Congo or Monaco doesnt change a thing either.

But of course almost no one will. Its like asking people to pay their taxes voluntarily.
A protocol change might be a bridge too far, but it might not be a bad idea to have the default client at least  suggest a higher fee for larger transactions.

Nitpick: the hashrate that pools publish is also just an estimate. Granted, its based on the number of shares, not the number of blocks, so it should be a lot more accurate.

Anyway, for calculating network hashrate, I dont see a reason to disbelieve any of the big pools

There is no saying he appeared months ago and "grew".  There have been 1 TX blocks for months or longer, its impossible to say if its the same miner or not, but the 1+TH appeared 2 weeks ago and pretty damn sudden. See chart I made earlier.

The point is not that he is mining anonymously, but that he is almost certainly stealing computing resources on a massive scale, and doing bitcoin a disfavor in more than one way. But maybe thieves have the right to remain anonymous in your world, and perhaps you dont care if botnets take control over bitcoin.

Besides, thief or not, if someone doesnt want his IP being tracked or published on sites like blockchain, all he has to do is stop mining blocks.  I dont see the difference between tracking deepbit blocks and MM's blocks.

You dont know that. You get the IP of whomever is relaying the block. How do you know it actually made it?

Even if this botnet would achieve 50% of the hashrate, not including transactions will only slow down transactions by 50%, so 10 extra minutes for single confirmations. Not a huge problem when compared to that other potential of a 50% botnet.

I will say, it does suck that honest miners have to compete with stolen computing resources, but thats life. I just hope it wont drive up difficulty to the point were honest miners are driven out of the market. That could be a real problem for bitcoin. At least we would need some competition between botnets to keep them "honest" lol.

Just a quick chart showing the number of 1 TX blocks per day. Click to enlarge:

Mystery miner can relay his blocks through whoever he wants.

If you want to do any investigation, AFAIK, you would need to run a modified bitcoin daemon that logs the IP, but youd need that deamon at the place mystery miner chooses to relay his blocks. If he does so consistently through blockchain or deepbit or whomever, perhaps you can talk to them and ask to log that info and then you might get something, although it would still be hard to tell if that IP is really a MM node or just someone relaying it to deepbit/blockchain/you/me.

Since MM can relay them through anyone he wants, I dont think there is any point, unless Im missing something.

Something is wrong with the stats, thats clear. Look at the times, those blocks didnt take 3 hours. At first glance thats all thats really wrong tho, the time displayed for block duration.

I really dont understand what you guys are reading in to those IPs?
The IPS are of whoever is relaying the blocks, you could be looking at the IP of deepbit, or any other pool or random bitcoin user.

What for? To find the relaying IPs? Not too sure what that would tell you. But I could write a little script to feed those hashes to blockchain.info and get whatever data you want, but Im not sure what it is you want.

I just generated a list of all 1 tx blocks since beginning of this year:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Apbj91OWg5HvdElMV0FQVWlGa1lsTThNWVVSenJXeWc

If you need anything else, just ask.

Sent a coin straight to them. Their first one 

You may also write me down for the next charity for at least 1BTC.