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I think it depends on your definition of fail.
Will it become a viable currency. Yes I think so.
Will it become centralized, and controlled by a handful of powerful (and wealthy) people. Yes I think so.
Bitcoin will be successful currency, but we will simply swap one unaccountable entity (central banks), for another.
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Well, like I said, a forum post does not a system make. Nobody is confusing your post with a "system" but it is possible to that a proposal is flawed even at the conceptual level. If you told me you were going to the moon by jumping high enough to break orbit, well I don't need to wait to see the engineering plans to tell you it isn't going to work. but a sanity check of hardware is not an unheard of thing, and it's clearly needed now. Your proposal isn't a sanity check, it is a ban randomly miners without any basis in the name of "doing something" and rack up even more losses due to orphans. Once again. It's a forum post with a high level approach. Details need to be worked out. If you want to write out the code, then I applaud you, but I'm not interested in debating the finer points of the protocol. Right now folks using btcguild are losing ~10 to 20% of their earnings to either malice or incompetence. A sanity check that cost less 10/20% would be net positive. |
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Those miners wouldn't even have a way to know it is a solution to a block.
Well that is the point isn't it? Clearly this would need to be flushed out and tested and instaban is simply rhetoric. I'm not going to engineer the entire test here in a forum post, but that's the top level pseudo code. However any miner that fails the test should be considered suspect and perhaps subject to an additional test. A miner with a 1% error rate would have a 1 in 1,000 chance of artificially failing 2 known good blocks. Make it 3 tests and the odds raise to 1 in 100,000 You are still not getting it. Some ASIC chips don't attempt every value in nonce range. Some never do under any conditions, the multcore chips break the nonce range into "chunks" with a chunk going to each core. They never have 100% of the cores active because nothing has 100% yield, some are turned on. So if the nonce that solves the block is 7289372 and it is sent to core 2 but core 2 is disabled then that miners will NEVER return a solution for that work. Of course you ignored the rest, how long do you wait? how much do you want to lose to orphans because you are waiting to publish a winning block and every second you delay the probability of another pool broadcasting a block and orphanning you increases. What about a miners that due to latency returns the solution after you publish the winning block? It isn't a viable system. Well, like I said, a forum post does not a system make. This is a problem that has to be solved, or pooled mining will die. We aren't going to solve (or at least I'm not going to try) in this thread, but a sanity check of hardware is not an unheard of thing, and it's clearly needed now. Folks are not going to stick around while they watch 20% of their earnings evaporate. |
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Those miners wouldn't even have a way to know it is a solution to a block.
Well that is the point isn't it? Clearly this would need to be flushed out and tested and instaban is simply rhetoric. I'm not going to engineer the entire test here in a forum post, but that's the top level pseudo code. However any miner that fails the test should be considered suspect and perhaps subject to an additional test. A miner with a 1% error rate would have a 1 in 1,000 chance of artificially failing 2 known good blocks. Make it 3 tests and the odds raise to 1 in 100,000 All this aside. It seems that pools now need a way to prove themselves reliable. As much as I like BTCGuild, I have moved away because it is crystal clear that it is now tainted in some way that costs me money. |
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I would think you could detect someone performing a block withholding attack on the pool through a simple test:
First identify your 'unluckiest' participants. Then when a block is solved, immediately send the work unit for the block to those miners. If they consistently fail to return the winning solution you know they are ripping you off.
There are a number of other attacks that could be detected with similar approaches.
What's troubling to me is the massive asymmetry of risks right now. The miners on BTCguild have over $50M in hardware investments that is depreciating at 25% / month . I'd be shocked if Micheal has $50k in total in hardware to run the pool.
My personal theory has been mentioned already:
<Tin foil hat on>
Startup 42e1 spends $2M on design and masks to build out their $5M 2Ph/s mine only to discover that the design has a flaw that prevents it from finding nonces with difficulties over 4.2 billion. It still hashes lots of results below that level, so instead of scrapping things they move all their machines off the internal pool to a big public pool.
<tin foil hat off>
There are many, many other reasons someone could be maliciously attacking a pool, and the stakes keep getting larger. If you're operating a public pool and not actively developing defenses, you will be burned.
And personally if I was clearing $250k / month off my pool, I wouldn't care what little people think either, but I would pay somebody to care.
Actually, You should send the the winning hash/nonce to ALL particpants. Just that hash. Every miner that doesn't return the winning block should instantly be blacklisted. THis is very very minor tax, but a huge payoff in preventing a withholding attack, or blocking bad hardware. |
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That's why I stopped mining here because you are constantly 'begging' for your rightful payout which should be 'automatic' like it is in other respected pools.
It's automatic here too. It doesn't change anything when you beg because it isn't on your schedule... If it's automatic here too - why am I waiting 2 weeks plus for my 'manual' payment? And still not in the queue. I work hard too so I know how that is. But if I chose to run a pool then I would 'run' a pool. If I couldn't manage my job and the pool, then I would pick one and do it properly. It requires a manual payout because it's so little an amount (under $5 worth!) that it would overload buggy miners to generate to it. If you're so starved that you can't wait a few months for $5, then you shouldn't be mining... If your implication is that wk does this 'pool' thing out of the goodness of his heart and makes no money out of it all This is correct. then 93.53% share reward? Shelved shares. Come on... The algorithms are public. What about the sharelog? |
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Maybe it's not malicious activity? Maybe there's something wrong with some piece of software being used?
For example, I have a number of S1s running through a Stratum proxy. How can I verify it's properly feeding random work to all the ants, and half of them aren't working on the same thing the other half are working on?
M
Would you mind sharing what stratum proxy you are using? Version? I've tried running my S1's through BFGMiner 3.10 and I receive 100% errors. I've seen other folks with the same issue |
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If some one wants to leave the pool thats fine.
If they want to blow out a rant on the way out the door, that's fine too!!
Roll my eyes, turn my head back to what I was doing before they interupted my day.
I choose to have a good day!
You can too!
Are a pool co-owner? |
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Those wires looks really thin.
Honestly, this looks more like a wiring problem than a cube problem.
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It's a fine pool and it's rock solid as far as uptime.
The only thing that I'm a little sore about is being dumped into the crappy end of the pool during a run of bad luck with no notice.
Here I thought I was hashing along fine the last few days, only to login after the weekend to find my earnings on a portion of my farm is in the dumper...and it's the portion that I use to stabilize variance.
Shrug. I'll get over it. Other than the lack of notice. It's great pool and one of the few that I do trust.
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I understand the reasoning, but it's dissapointing.
I split my hashing across multiple pools and I use PPS for some of my workers as a way to reducing variance.
I guess I'm move those over to CEX. The 0% fee is nice and they have enough hash rate that it's really dampens the variance.
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Worked out a secure way to do a manual payout.
Majority of queue was paid, minus some blocks that are not yet confirmed. Stats should reflect this shortly.
278.49192020 BTC in manual payments applied to balances from tx 8ff569995ff56632309fcf968d2a30beda1140ede49f4460783a35f1b2f791b3
50.12648701 BTC in manual payments applied to balances from tx 2b24410cc1dab9f3b4f1de9937e627a98b56838f563ff4827f01890731ea3200
125.06159973 BTC in manual payments applied to balances from tx 0bb57f6e38012c86d4c5a28c904f2675082859147921a707d48961015a3e5057
964.90392745 BTC in manual payments applied to balances from tx dbab1c84db23abc33c2c89a650b23e2996e14e5876334d083f7281b62e3ef898
I will do another when more coins mature to 120+ confirms.
Close to a $1 million in payouts. How many CEO's do we know that run a $250 million dollar business in his spare time on tips? You guys should charge and hire a profession staff. My hat is off to you though. There are very very few people in this world that would work 12 hour days handling that massive amount of money for almost zero pay, and NOT be tempted to skim some. |
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No I don't
Unfortunately, I think we now know who he is.
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Classic game theory problem.
If everyone did this, the "cheaters" would be rewarded by jumping in and mining during the "downtime". Once everyone recognizes this, then everyone becomes a "cheater" which puts us back to square 1.
Which is a short way of saying it'll never happen.
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Hi all,
Looks like a bug in my stats database replication code caused the stats to stop receiving data from the core server about 12 hours ago. This is why the stats were not updating.
Also, an orphaned block that took an extended period of time to be reorg'd out caused a CPPSRB failsafe (which paused payouts).
Sheesh... I leave for one day (Valentines Day!) and all hell breaks loose. lol.
In any case, the newly replaced core database servers remained happy throughout all of this, and all shares are accounted for.
CPPSRB is catching up (it is about 12 hours behind) and I will fix the stats replication bug and get that catching up also.
Afterwards I will get a manual payout together and get everyone paid. No worries!
-wk
Note: I used self-moderated for the first time just now and removed ~3 troll posts.
well tnx for the payout rly ... but who gives a shit about ur private life ... $ is $ .. and erasing posts does not changes the facts ... this pool stats/payouts crashes too often for a such good pool despite the really honest & responsible work of the owners ... if u cant handle it for free just make some % better then putting pool of unknowable for users state for undefined time ... Cut whizkid some slack. He is handling over $200 million in bitcoin payments a year and is doing it for less than minimum wage, relying on the generosity of members and equipment donations. Remember, he has a full time job besides eligius. If you want more uptime and statistics, you should donate more. Furthermore, he is perfectly entitled to delete criticism in his own thread. Unless you have some praise, criticism shouldn't be be done here. |
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Depends on your luck.
If I had been mining solo, I would have paid for my hardware several times over by now as I have found several blocks.
But since I was in a pool, the earnings were shared, so I'm still behind the curve on equipment payback.
Over the VERY long haul, it's the same minus the pool fee (or pool theft)
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You can use Cex.io to do this.
Method 1
Mine with cex/ghash. Use their distribute feature to have 10% go to 10 different addresses. All earnings will be divided however you want.
Method 2
Mine with whoever you want. (BTC, bitminer etc). Have their earnings deposited to the CEX deposit address. Then use the cex distribute feature. This way you aren't mining at all at ghash (which some people take issue with), but you can use their distribution feature for free. Only catch is that it introduces at 24 hour delay in the distribution of earnings.
I use method #2. I have different pools all depositing btc earnings at CEX. Once a day cex distributes the btc earnings to the addresses I specify, in the % I specify.
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I am very suspicious of 0% pools. Running a large pool is full time job and computing and data center space isn't cheap. While I suppose there are people that are willing to work 10 hour days for free, and spend thousands per month of their own money and hope that donations cover it, it does seem odd doesn't it? Mother Theresa of Bitcoin?
Add in that pools are now multi-million dollar business's. A pool with say 15% of hashing power has revenue of $219 million per year. (30 blocks a day, 365 days a year, $800/coin)
How many CEO's running a $219 million dollar business would do so purely on donations and cover expenses out his own pocket?
How would it be done? Withholding blocks or withholding shares would be detectable (although you could mask shares by not reporting %'s instead exact numbers). The maifia solved this problem long ago. Skimming. The easiest way to have a dummy "house account". Credit 1 dummy share for every 100 shares would dilute the earnings overall by 1% and deliver $2million a year in earnings.
Creating a dummy share for every 1,000 real shares would pay $219,000 a year in earnings. (plus donations)
A skim of $2million, or $219,000 well within variance and luck and virtually undetectable.
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The funny thing is Gold is really "un-green".
Mining gold involves massive amounts of energy and churning of the land, to find relatively tiny amounts of gold specs. Then after we spend all that effort and energy, we store it in the ground in bars and hire armed guards 24x7 to protect it.
I love gold. I'm a gold bug. BUt I'll never buy the arugment that gold is more ecologically friendly than bitcoin,
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I have found that bitcoin mining is VERY green, although not as green as I had hoped.
Unfortunately, it seems to be less green over time and will eventually turn red.
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