Which pools are working and have any hashing power?

1GH has 58 of last 100 blocks.  8 in a row.  Does anyone know who they are and how long they've been around?

ypool.net ‏@ypool_net  1m

Due to the massive ongoing DDoS attacks motivated by the addition of MaxCoin we decided to drop support for the coin.

@sal002

Thank you for the hard work!  I appreciate the site.

The difficulty on TagCoin is stuck and wrong after the fork, making it look much more profitable than it really is.  Actual difficulty is 40-50 or so, but CoinChoose keeps showing difficulty 21 @ block 12057.  Where is that getting scraped from?

And one other thing--if you look at the transaction 95054f44018eda3be92f3274cc31d56dc7e84c8a6d0f5919da09a8b9e01aadd2  you'll see that a lot of the addresses involved are related to HHTT Mining Pool, so perhaps someone quite a bit more sophisticated is trying to rip off HHTT?  It would hardly seem worth any significant effort to get my .11BTC, but for 300BTC or more from a pool, I suppose the game changes.

@PrintMule et al:

I suppose my password could be brute forced, I hadn't intended any great level of security here.  That is why there was only .11BTC to be had.  My own previous attempts at cracking a wallet (my own, of course) weren't all that successful, but the program I had only did a few attempts per second.  I had to seed it with some pretty good guesses or have a 2-character password to get in.

I don't want to reveal the password, but it was on the order of "malleus4" or "centrifugal9" or "rhapsody3".  Oddly enough, PrintMule, the phrase "correct horse battery staple" appears in the address of the guy who got ripped for 300BTC.   

This leaves the questions of:

1.  What malware finds and sends wallet.dat files?  I suppose a decoy wallet might be the thing?  And then rename  your actual wallet  "familyvacation.jpg"?

2.  (the one bugging me the most)  What is the .00006BTC for?

3.  Why wait?  I realized TraderCoin was a virus/keylogger (if that is the source of this theft) and cleaned it up, but if I was more concerned or had more BTC, I would have transferred them out immediately.  The TraderCoin keylogger thing was 10/24/13, almost two weeks earlier.

I cleaned up pretty good after the TraderCoin debacle.  I just rescanned and checked for rootkits, nothing exciting came out.  My old, unused, miningware downloads did have various junk in them (a lot of Crypt-OSW) but nothing active.  I'm OK, I just would like to know how these things are perpetrated and especially why the .00006 payment?   

I just had a minor theft (0.11BTC, I'll live) and while I understand ways I can positively prevent this (offline wallet, etc), I'm quite curious how the thief did this.

I'm just running the client 0.82/Win7 with my wallet encrypted with a short but unusual password.  I have not opened the client for about two weeks, but I did today just to check the balance.  As soon as I opened it, the balance was .10996851, but after it downloaded the blockchain, it was 0.00000000000000, nada, zilch.  There were two transactions:

First, 11/3/2013, from address 1NpovwBu8RdXYZUHHd4ZWEEnGNgAu3QfWy, tx # 95054f44018eda3be92f3274cc31d56dc7e84c8a6d0f5919da09a8b9e01aadd2 , there is a .00006BTC payment to my address.

Then, 11/6/2013, to address 1NTcSTt3MEW4Mw8SRy9xXmMstk8Pimcjqn, tx # 7c348e83cb9bbabfb567770e322384b37712fcaf704bb17b09e4ca6c3232b71b,  my BTC goes out the door--.11BTC to the thief, then 2851 satoshis as a tx fee.

The 1Npov address was used for a number of these .00006 payments, and a lot (but  not all) of the addresses that received these payments got cleaned out at about the same time I did.  Some of the payments were substantial.  THe 1NTcS address was used to clean out a few accounts, but other addresses were used as well.  One guy got cleaned out of over 300BTC, here is his link from the explorer.

https://blockchain.info/address/1JwSSubhmg6iPtRjtyqhUYYH7bZg3Lfy1T

So if anyone can tell me, how is this done?  My computer is not particularly secure--Windows firewall, Avast antivirus, but I've downloaded and tried a pile of miners, altminers, etc, including the now infamous "tradercoin" that had a built in keylogger.  I'd be surprised if that one worked, as I caught it and the keylog files didn't have any relevant info.  If you had my whole computer and were smart, you might guess my wallet.dat encryption password.  I'm especially curious about this--what is the significance of the .00006 BTC payment three days prior.

Any insight appreciated.

I tried this on several computers--one accidentally (&^%!!?*&) and then deliberately.  It logs keystrokes on Windows 7 and XP computers, but it seems to vary where it puts stuff, both in directories and in the registry.  It puts a crss.exe and fmss.exe file in one of the user/appdata folders.  I'd recommend just scanning your C: drive (or OS drive, if you are different than most) for them.  Then scan your registries for "crss", "fmss" and "MXsound".  You can look in msconfig and you may or may not see them, so you can check them off before restarting.  Once I found everything, it seemed to go away without too much protest.  There may be other files, so if anyone sees any different ones, please report.  The crss.exe and fmss.exe showed in explorer with a nice blue-circle "T", the Tradercoin logo.

If you think you have it fixed, rename afsdsjk to afsdsjk.txt, then see if another, newer afsdsjk file appears.  If it does, you still have the keylogger loaded!   

This was a wakeup call for me, I can't believe I was silly enough to allow this.  Anyone else actually lose anything?  Discover important passwords in the afsdsjk file?

Is there a working SBC block explorer anywhere?

Silverwolf;

I wanted to ask you a question.  How does a block get found by "unknown" in a pool?  See SBC block# 52209 for example.  There was a pool I tried briefly before yours and there were a lot of blocks found by "unknown" and the payouts weren't right.  Yours seemed right, but wouldn't Mr. Unknown complain about not getting paid, since he doesn't show in the PPLNS stats?

The network hashrate is estimated by (blocks solved/time), but pool hashrate by (shares/time).  So with one pool, network hashrate = pool hashrate x luck.  Luck can exceed 100% and often does.

So I've mined some SBC.  However, since some miners will sell, in order for the price to hold or rise, some have to BUY it.  In order to get people to buy, it needs to have VALUE.  So, where is the value?  SBC isn't novel, like BTC was--there are dozens of coins now.  You can't spend it anywhere, unless you want an overpriced sex toy.  Launching a coin today requires a lot more than changing the name and the "magic number".  

Todays price is 3050 satoshis. The blockchain height is 42975, meaning there are 1074375 mined SBC (not counting the 1.25M pre-mined).  Thus the total market cap of SBC is 32.7684375 BTC.  About $3500 US.  

Given all the alternatives, I see no advantages to SBC, whether as a purchasing method, a store of value or as a novelty.  I think it has failed already.  Anyone who has a different take, please jump in and tell me why I'm wrong.

I think a quiz would be great idea, but how about disclosure/disclaimers?

1.  I have looked up and understand the Bitcoin Venn Diagram.

2.  I know how much a kilowatt hour of electricity costs me.

3.  I agree not to try to calculate how many cents per hour I can make mining altcoins.