Yay.

Dang. Did I hear correctly that the bounty was 8000 BTC? Nice.

I realized something this morning: The average number of shares per block should be close to the current difficulty

Perhaps you all knew this, but it was big news to me. The number of shares per block bounces around a ton, but if you average it over a long enough time period, it should be close to the current difficulty.

Once I came to this stunning realization, I was able to make this graph using data from here: http://mining.bitcoin.cz/stats/?history=1000

Check it out:



My original question to myself was: why the heck is the pool solving blocks as if difficulty was ~80000 instead of difficulty ~69000??

Now I have my answer (we appear to be victims of probability), and I thought I would share it with you guys.

That is exactly what I want! That way I can set up:

me_5770
me_5870-FriendBob
me_5870-I7PC
me_5870-oldPC
me_5970-GPU0
me_5970-GPU1

etc

Please let me know as soon as I can do something like that!

Thanks.

I checked out this pool this morning, because I am interested in diversifying so I don't have all my eggs in one basket.

Only one thing stops me from moving some of my workers over here. My setup makes the unchangeable numeric naming of workers really inconvenient. I'll have to remember which number is which worker, and each worker migrated here would have to use a number rather than its already-assigned name. I thought about just creating a bajillion workers on your site and then just having each worker run a checksum on its name to determine its number on your server, but that only solves half the problem and might annoy you guys.

If you allow me to customize alphanumeric worker names, then I'll migrate some workers here right away.

Other than that, the pool looks awesome.

Thanks!

I thought about this some last night, and I am completely convinced that slush is not stealing blocks.

Why? Because that would be an incredibly stupid way to rip off people, and he is obviously not incredibly stupid.

If he wanted to rip people off, all he has to do is give himself more shares in the pool. He could make a ton of money and it would be completely unprovable. The only way you could even detect that kind of fraud is if a large group of miners were closely watching their payout over time versus expected payout, and comparing notes. Even then, it could never arise above a strong suspicion.

If slush wants more money, he can get it easily, and we'll probably never be the wiser. All you can do is watch your payouts and make sure they seem proportional to your processing power over time.

There is NO WAY he would steal whole blocks when he can rip us off by crediting himself extra shares so easily.

If he is truly evil, he could also rip us off by just stopping payouts, claiming technical difficulty, and waiting to see how many bitcoins he makes before people give up on getting their bitcoins out of the pool. I was starting to worry yesterday that just such a scenario might be unfolding. Now that payouts have started again, I feel bad for doubting him, and I sent him a small donation which I hope will help make up for that.

Hey slush,

I got my backlog of bitcoins. Small donation sent for all the trouble you've been through lately.

Hey Slush,

I'm inclined to believe you are honest for a number of reasons, but I don't know you personally, so I have to allow for the possibility that there might be some amount of scamming going on even though it seems unlikely.

Imagine now that this payout problem will take multiple days to fix (hopefully it won't, but just imagine). At what point do you start paying out bitcoins manually to your biggest miners just to prove that you are honest?

If you don't have a date you will commit to when you would start doing that, then it begins to look much more suspicious.

Alternately, are you willing to put up a large number of BTC as collateral to a forum member that everyone trusts until the current problem is over?

Thanks for your work running the pool. I'm sure this will all be over soon and everyone will feel silly for doubting you. People just get paranoid and emotional whenever money is involved.

Heh. For the lazy, the answer to the joke is hidden here (highlight to read): ** "Miner partner" **

My confirmed reward stopped going up a few hours ago. I'm guessing that is related.

Thought experiment: if a pool operator in a pool this size claimed technical difficulties making payouts, how many bitcoins could he collect before miners would cut their losses and move their miners to mine solo or in another pool? At 150 GHash/Second, a trick like that right now would allow him to collect more than 2000 BTC/day until people started getting wise to what was happening. Compare that to the less than 50 BTC/day he makes collecting 2% and you can see how that might be a profitable exit strategy if he decided he was done being a pool operator.

This is NOT an accusation of any kind, and I am not pulling my miners out of the pool or suggesting that anyone else do so. It's just that this particular problem makes me wonder what would happen if slush were evil.

I think the test for evilness would be whether after 24 hours or so the pool operator started making manual payments to the biggest miners while he worked on fixing the problem. I think that would be sufficient to prove no ill intent.

I personally wonder about the difficulty of discovering someone's private key in their wallet.dat by brute force attack. I think this would require 2²⁵⁶ hashes to guarantee finding the private key with an average crack time of 2²⁵⁵ hashes. Can anybody familiar with cryptography answer that question and/or elaborate?

If that is true, and we assume that in 2011 a very wealthy attacker can bring 1 THash/second to bear on the problem, and the attacker works constantly on the problem starting now, purchasing new hardware which keeps up with Moore's law over the following years (processing power doubling every two years), his descendants will steal your private key and all your descendants bitcoins somewhere around 2390 (unless they get unbelievably lucky before then). A hundred years later in 2490, anyone with the equivalent of a PC will be able to crack a wallet.dat private key in about a second. Can anyone check my math on that?

If that is true, then bitcoins won't ever truly be "lost" because in a few hundred years, they will turn up again when in becomes feasible to crack a wallet.dat private key. Hopefully whoever manages to dig up those lost coins will be able to exchange them into whatever the equivalent form of bitcoins is at that time (with much stronger cryptography).

Also, my UI enhancements greasemonkey script does this calculation for all previous blocks on the stats page. You can get the link from a couple posts ago or post #1 on this thread.


I'm getting this too.

edit: it looks fine now

Hey Bob. It's time you knew the truth.

We are actually all taking a little bit of your mining profits. It's a conspiracy against you, and we are all benefiting from your loss.

I was supposed to keep this a secret, but my conscience couldn't take it anymore.

I know you will probably leave the pool and never come back because of this, and I will have to live with that, even though I will miss you very much.

Heh. Thanks. I'm in the U.S., and I think Bitcoins will be ridiculously valuable someday, so I'm devoting as much of my meager budget as I can to collecting them. How about you?

I have changed my script to add an option to change the "Statistics" link so that it takes you to http://mining.bitcoin.cz/stats/?history=60 - this should show all the unconfirmed blocks for you guys without having to edit the URL as shown above.

I also added a link to an externally hosted chat room so that you guys can commiserate about high difficulty and those nasty extra-long blocks.

You can always get my latest UI enhancements script here: http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/98553

If this script is making your life easier, please consider a donation: 19hMEAaRMbEhfSkeU4GT8mgSuyR4t4M6TH

Sweet - thanks! It may seem small now, but I personally believe that someday that bitcoin will be worth a lot of money.

I have my own independent estimate of the whole network's GHash/Second based on slush's posted GHash/Second and the percentage of all bitcoin blocks found by slush's pool. You can see my estimate if you install my Greasemonkey script and view slush's stats page.

For the first time since I started watching the total network number, my estimate fell below 400 GHash/second today. I assume this is a response to the recent drop in bitcoin prices.

Then I realized something. It is extremely easy to remove mining hardware from the network, but much harder to get new mining hardware to add to the network. I believe the two-week lag we see in the correlation between bitcoin prices and network hash rate only applies to increases in bitcoin prices, since it takes time to get new hardware bought and set up. I would expect that a decrease in bitcoin prices will result in a decrease in network hash rate almost immediately, and I believe we have just seen this happen.

I was wondering, how long am I going to have that embarrassing "Newbie" badge next to my name, since I have been into bitcoins in a big way for awhile now. So I looked it up. I'll be a Newbie until I hit 50 posts. The levels are:

Newbie < 50
Jr. Member < 100
Full Member < 250
Sr. Member < 500
Hero Member >= 500

I wish I could donate 1 BTC to the forum and have my badge changed to "Enthusiast" or something. Oh well. I guess I'll just have to converse more.

I couldn't understand half the jokes, but I sent 0.5 BTC, just because I had fun trying to figure them out.

Interesting that two of the jokes involved an object harming itself due to an inherent property of that object. For instance, a banana slipping on its own skin, and a match burning itself when it scratched its head. I wonder if that is a regular feature of Chinese humor.

I have no idea what used to be on the NullVoid site, but here's where I get my difficulty data:

http://bitcoin.sipa.be/

I sent Nefario a PM asking about the possibility that she might get arrested over a big publicity stunt. I don't think we should proceed without her ok.

I propose that the bounty would be paid to the group which gets the word "bitcoin" at least a passing mention in xinhua, chinadaily, and worldjournal due to their stunt, whatever it may be.

I chose these three sites because they are the top three results for a search of "Chinese News" in google, and they all have English versions.

Edit: Nefario's profile used to say "female", but now gender has been blanked out. Students have referred to Nefario as a man, so I assume that was a mistake in his profile.