You are manipulating and you know it.
I'm not, I am making the most simplistic of statistical arguments against a logical fallacy. To say it technically you've adopted a model so complex that we cannot tell if you've overfit and can not reject the null hypothesis.
I can demonstrate this another way; lets take your proposed tests:
"having 4 nounces with differences less than 1.8%, 0.12% and 7.2% respectively of the range in this order."
"the block size, also points to the fact that it is the same miner who mined the blocks. 731 kB blocks are quite common as noted earlier by someone else, but it is not
very likely either to find them consecutively. " you haven't given a numerical threshold, so I'll just take that to be sizes within 10%
"The third piece of evidence is how close in time are these blocks."-- they're not actually unusually close, given hashrate changes, but I'll apply the softer limit of allow below 10 minutes.
"The fourth piece of evidence is the non-chronological timestamps " -- these are also fairly common through Bitcoin's history; but I'll go ahead and apply it too.
"The fifth piece of evidence is that the first block is mined by AntPool and the next 3 by anonymous." -- I can't mechanically apply this one, since it's just bc.i's opinion; but as you'll see leaving out a constraint only aids your argument now.
This is your test for a specific non-disclosed mining optimization. Since you won't disclose the optimization I cannot argue with that point, though it sounds implausibly over-complex.
Now we're going to ask the related question: "How much of the network is using the optimization identified by this test?";
There are _no_ there matches in the blockchain meeting that criteria other than the single range you've named. What should we then assume the proportion of hashrate using your optimization is? Approximately 0.
You will agree that this facts are independent by themselves. You will agree that they happen rarely with a small probability. The probability of seeing them simultaneously is small.
You add: "This is your test for a specific non-disclosed mining optimization." No, it is not. This is my test to detect that something out of normal is happening.
Don't insist on this line. I have withdraw any claim about mining optimization. Why are you insisting into something that I won't discuss?
If it is (as for 99.99% of normal people), how would you go about proving that is out of normal? Won't you compute the probability of seeing this occurence?
But then it will be fallacious according to your comment since it is "after the fact"!!!
Nonsense!! Otherwise empirical knowledge won't exist!!
It's well established that normal people routinely engage in completely defective statistical reasoning. Statistics are unintuitive to people, virtually everyone finds qualitative reasoning more intuitive than quantitative reasoning.
I did ask a very simple question and you are unable to answer it in simple form: "how would you go about proving that this is out of normal?". Let me rephrase: What is sufficient evidence to infer that something out of your knownledge is going on?
This is a question that ask working scientists ask themselves all the time.
What you do is to explain that in order to detect something out of normal going on you need to have a working hypothesis. This would be great but it is not always the case. Indeed most of the time is not the case.
For example, astronomers detected anomalies provoked by Pluton before knowing its existence, or noticed the advance of the perihelion of Mercury well before having a clue about General Relativity.
So, from what you tell, for you to see 100 nounces in consecutive blocks won't be out of normal? How many do you need? 1.000? 10.000? And then how will you go about proving that this is anomalous? i.e. what will be your test?
Very simple question to which you don't provide a simple answer. From what you tell you seem to refuse that there is any anomaly if you don't have a working hypothesis (!). I guess that that's exclusively your problem.
On top of that you deny anyone else the possibility of inferring that something out of normal is going on, even when confronted with ridiculous probabilities. This seems to me pretty short sighted.
An ideal way to reason about things (...)
There is no "ideal way to reason about thing". We reason with what we have and observe and we cannot choose it.
(...)is to first understand the process;
Yea...so astronomers noticing the advance of the Mercury perihelion would be treated as sacrilegious...or those noticing the heliocentric system will be accused of heresy..."Eppur si muove"...
form a hypothesis and from the hypothesis develop a model without looking at the data: "If vulnerability X is being exploited I will see blocks of with structures and probabilities X, if X is not exploited I will see blocks with structures and probabilities !X". You can then ask what the KL divergence of these two distributions are, and if it is very small then you will gain almost no confidence even with many observations; the question may be undecidable. If there is a separation between the probabilities then observations one can then apply a statical test to reject one alternative or another with a intentional level of chance of error.
An example of this would be "From the structure of SHA256, and the fact that the 80 byte input requires two runs of the compression function; someone could create slightly more efficient specialized hardware which hardcodes much of the message expansion and initial rounds from the second compression function run-- and scans by rolling the block version. If this optimization were at play I would expect to find that the block version would have very high entropy, perhaps 32 bits though anything more than a few bits would be suspicious; blocks exploiting this behavior would be expected to have uniform version numbers, rather than a constant in non-exploiting blocks" We could then apply this test to the blockchain, and because of the big gap between two cases we could decide pretty quickly if the test was indicating. This isn't a definitive test; there could be other reasons for the strange behavior, like miners trying to reduce their network bandwidth usage; we could try to make it more specific by adding a rule like "and we expect blocks with random versions to have nonces with far less entropy". ---- unfortunately, keeping the reasoning private prevents that kind of thoughtful analysis; all we can go on is how "weird" blocks are in the absence of a reasoned model, and thats not very useful since every block is "weird" by some definition. Its like if you look for the number 11 you'll find it everywhere.
Obviously we can make such assumptions with more knowledge. Let me try something that can pass your censorship: I guess we agree that the main variable for mining a block is the header of the (double) hash of the previous block. If you knew the hash in advance you would be able to premine the block. By "premine" I mean doing most of the computation work well in advance (nothing spurious suggested by "premine", just "pre"-doing the work). The Merkel root tree hash can be kept static except maybe for impact of the extranounce (for example when you mine 1 transaction blocks). You will agree that someone with a performing mining algorithm will have a lot of advantage by witholding mined blocks in order to speed up the mining of the next ones and then releasing them in a short time. leading to sequences of nearby mined blocks. If he wants to conceal this fact he will mine the blocks anonymously (or with another miner that he controls). This means that we have to pay particular attentiion to close by mined blocks of anonymous origin. And we have to pay special attention to similarities that can reveal that the same miner is behind these blocks (in our case, nearby nounces could indicate similar hardware, or same block size similar algorithms).
Sometimes there are free parameters-- we want to ask a question like "does weight over some threshold cause heart attacks? and if so what is that threshold?", without knowing the parameter in advance. This had the danger of fitting the model to the data and telling us nothing at all (like my example of "predicting" the nonces that just happened); one tool used to address this problem with parametric models is cross validation: You split your observations up and use one subset to train the model and the other to test. If the effectiveness goes away during cross-validation the model is likely overfit. The protection isn't perfect because if you tweak the scheme based on the results you miss overfitting the "meta"-parameters.. This is effectively the test I applied above: You fit a model (a set of gap differences, block timstamps, inter-arrival times) and I excluded a single hit which you appear to have used to set your parameters from the testing set and found your model matched _no_ blocks at all.
Come on....what is not allowed is to pick an artificial or stupid complicate criteria. To look at nounce dispersion is natural.
What shouldn't be allowed is bad statistical reasoning, which can happen no matter how "natural" your model is, what primarily matters is how many degrees of freedom it has. What you are looking at there is _not_ dispersion; I tried to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you meant one of the standard metrics for dispersion (_range_) and you insisted on a complex polytope shape constraint; with probably something on the order of 34 bits of parameter space (three percentages to 0.1 precision without permutation), plus some more model freedom in that its looking at differences instead of absolute values.
If I instead use the standard deviation (another common dispersion metric) we that 0.1875% of 4-block sets (given uniform nonces) would have a standard deviation as low as your selected one; so again, something we'd see every few days.
Could you cut this short, don't divagate, and just let us know how you will proceed in order to prove that a sequence of nearby consecutive nounces is out of normal?
How many nounces and with what proximity your criteria will show that they are our of normal?
I have provided my answer on this. We are still waiting yours. Your answer must contain a number and a % proximity. For me n=3 events and a geometric mean of prob of the order of 1% starts to trigger my interest, and light a red flag if
this occurs combined with other unusual coincidences.
or more precise description how miners work.
There is huge amounts of information; everything is open source except for the RTL and mask images of common hardware; though most follow not too far from prior FPGA designs in their overall structure.
Can you point to relevant threads in the forum?
Let me ask you something simple: Do you think these four blocks were mined by the same miner?
It appears unlikely, all four are miners that appear to constantly reuse a static address for their income, but they're each different. Walletexplorer does an overly aggressive 'taint' analysis and links many addresses to each, but they're disjoint. The lowest number appears to be antpool, the next appears to be AnxPro.com, the next is likely Polmine.pl (it frequently pays addresses connected with polmine.pl).
We can compute/estimate the probability of all the other "pieces of evidence" that are independent events with small probabilities. What is astonishing is the coincidence of all these facts.
There is nothing astonishing that when you pick criteria to fit the data, you find that it fits the data. There is also nothing astonishing that when a model created this way seems unlikely on a uniform basis that it will fail to generalize to anything but the data you fit it on.
I believe they prove that all 4 blocks were mined by the same miner (then these facts would not be independent and it makes more sense that they occur simultaneously).
Great; so you'll accept concrete proof that these blocks were mined by independent parties as a definitive proof that you were incorrect?
It would be great to prove that this miners are distinct and independent, but they may be collaborating. Event if these miners are independent they may be using the same algorithm that produces similar output.
In any case it won't prove that what we have seen is a rare event, it will give evidence that is pure coincidence.
I have retracted and erased all claims. I wait for your gentleman's word of removing your negative rating.
(also, I understood that the forum "Trust system" is for trading (since the first thing you see is "Trade with extreme caution!"). I doesn't seem to be designed to be used for academic discrepancy.
I'm having a hard time figuring out what you mean by retracted and erased; your posts in this thread continue to claim
"It is clear that someone found a trick for fast mining. I kind of happen to know what might be.",
"It is premining at some extend. Won't disclose more for the moment." and so on. You continue to hold that you have "secret" knowledge which you will not disclose so that it can be discussed on its merits or lack thereof-- this entire thread is a great big advertisement for this claim and seems to have served you little other purpose; which the experienced professionals on this forum find to be non-credible and not supported by the evidence you've presented.
You are wrong.
I have retracted and erased all comments (if I have overlooked any, please let me know), in particular those that you quote (where did you get the quote?). Obviously I cannot erase people quoting me. You should ask them.
I haven't traded anything with you, and everybody with whom I have traded are 100% satisfied. I would appreciate that you don't use your trustworthy position in order to discredit me for disagreeing academically with you.
Moreover your comments "I suspect Valiron is either trying to scam someone out of paying for his "knowledge" or that he is attempting to manipulate the market price of Bitcoin; " are diffamatory and without ground. Also it is
ridiculous to pretend that I can manipulate the market by discussing anomalies in the block validations! I believe that the bitcoin market is a bit more robust...).
As I explained privately, your behavior so far is indistinguishable from a person who is willfully and fraudulently claiming to know of non-public mining optimizations in the hope of selling them to some greedy sucker who is unable to asset their merit except on the your misleading qualitative claim that the blocks look 'weird'. Protecting the forum's participants from being deceived themselves or from suffering the traffic from a flood of hopeful scammers demands that we call it out when we see the potential of it-- I say this not as the subfourm moderator or a developer of the Bitcoin system, but just as a community member... There is plenty of room for doubt; I'd say it's even more likely that you're just confused by the statistics of it, but the benefit of doubt can't be given freely, since those looking to exploit people will just sail through that opening. I offered you a simple mechanism which you can use to distinguish yourself-- share your complete theory with (ideally) the thread or privately with a respected member of the community; in doing so you gain the ability to refine it against the forge of experience, discover what (if any) parts are already known; and, in the possibility that there is something to be concerned about, gain the ability to protect Bitcoin from any potential harm if required. (I think you greatly underestimate the potential harm of privately held substantial mining optimizations-- beyond some threshold they would result in the complete centralization of the bitcoin system)
That's funny. How easy you condemn people without ground or any evidence, and how exigent and narrow minded you are in recognizing statistical evidence on blockchain validations.
I haven't tried to sell anything nor scam anyone and everyone who has followed the thread knows that. I never scammed anyone in my life and I hate scammers that are around the Bitcoin project because the image
damage they cause to the Bitcoin project.
What we have seen is your extreme aggressivity at me for mentioning the possibility that algorthms boosting the performance of mining may exist. You have been manipulative from the beginning accusing me of threatening bitcoin security.
Well, my friend, some people reading us are not that naive as you might think. What is worrisome, really worrisome, is your attitude. People may think that you know about these boosting algorithms and you are just trying to conceal them
from public knowledge using your power position as moderator. In particular, you admitted that you are actively mining, therefore you are incurring in an obvious conflict of interest: I can state, as disclaimer, that I don't mine..
If I was evil-minded as you I would think that way.
But I am not. I trust your good faith. Even though...I don't like to go into maters discussed in private messages, but since you go into it, I could also go into it and remind you that you wrote something that sounds very disturbing...(and to what I don't give a fuck as I explained to you by choosing the precise wording).
The forum trust is a metric of trust; I explained in the rating where the distrust comes from. Your claims here are not credible to any of the subject matter experts and as far as we can tell they're based on erroneous statistical reasoning, you're shielding your theories from criticism by hiding behind secrecy, forcing a debate around statistical minutia and how "weird" the blocks feel qualitatively, rather than the merits of your idea. Only a few weeks ago you were asking questions (using asics to hash files) that showed a profound lack of research and understanding of Bitcoin mining. I want to be sure someone considering trading with you over these ideas is aware that other community members do not currently consider your claims credible or likely to be well founded. Anyone is free to read the rating and come to their own conclusions.
You attribute yourself the privilege to talk in the name of the whole community. On which grounds? Your position as moderator and developer gives a valuable opinion (more than mine in the eyes of the community, no question about that),
but you cannot talk for other people, nor predetermine that they have your same opinion. We all have seen posts of people disagreeing with you and willing to understand what is going on. There are people around here that know more math
than you do. are open minded, and understand perfectly well the arguments I gave. Speak for yourself as I do and let others speak for themselves.
With respect to "matter experts" what we have discovered is that you don't have any serious background on statistics or probabilities. And in your case, you don't know how research inference works. As for me I do recognize that
I know little about mining hardware, certainly you know more, but I probably can teach you some lessons about cryptography and hashing.
I'm sorry that you find it heavy-handed. I would prefer if there were a way to make ratings which were more targeted or conditional. In consideration of this, I'll go and reduce it to neutral to avoid triggering the red flag on you. I am not seeking to cause you distress.
I thank you. No distress caused, just unfairness felt.
Your groundless defamation is still there: "I suspect Valiron is either trying to scam someone out of paying for his "knowledge" or that he is attempting to manipulate the market price of Bitcoin; "
