F2Pool is directly threatening Bitcoin's future

[kano]

One of the 2 biggest pools, F2Pool, that controls over 22% of the Bitcoin hashrate (over 22% for the past month), is directly threatening Bitcoin's future.

Hash rates for the past month:
https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/pools?resolution=1m

Firstly the obvious discussion about SPV mining and risking forks of the network.

Secondly, that SPV mining is generating empty blocks that confirm no new Bitcoin transactions.

Thirdly, they have now increased the transaction fee they use to accept transactions.

Result, one of the biggest Bitcoin pools, over 22% of Bitcoin blocks, is, again, reducing the amount of transactions they will accept.


Now if every F2Pool block was full, you could indeed argue that they are not reducing the number of transactions Bitcoin can support, but no that is not the case with F2Pool.

Seriously, people need to stop mining there and mine at some other smaller pool, for the sake of the future of Bitcoin.

Don't mine at my pool if you don't like me. I'm fine with that. But pick another smaller pool, not F2Pool

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[mikefallen]

[Guruclef]

Sorry mikefallen... could you add a little explanation to your post?
As I'm rather new and inexperienced I don't get what you mean by your images.

edit: explained below, thanks bitbaby

[bitbaby]

This is going to become a huge problem, if it isn't already. Miner pools/farms with lot of power are going to define terms on how its going to be and NO miners won't join the smaller pools, they want their ROI and don't care about what happens to future of Bitcoin. And the image above shows that not only them some of the others are doing it too.

[OneInchWonder]

I like smaller  pools  and rather help them out and keep the mining  spread  out.

[sloopy]

In the F2pool thread macbook-air(the person responsible for the antics at F2pool / discus fish and moderator of the F2pool thread) has selectively been deleting my posts.

The last ones he made an announcement that he was pruning anyone with a "red" trust rating, which dogie has left me neg trust because I called him out for several things, including the advice he gave to someone who recently purchased an S7 miner to only use 2 plugs per hash card which is a strict warranty violation. He told someone to do something which can cancel their warranty and if they had any kind of power issue it would be completely obvious what had been done. The guy just plain gives bad advice to many new miners and before I became involved with the SPV mining / empty block cause I was debating him and his antics so he left me bad trust. Every single person I have done deals with from OGnasty to Finsky, sidehack, phillip and so many others know how trustworthy I am so it isn't ever that I would be concerned about anyone doing business with me.
Then macbook deletes my posts, even the ones where I politely asked him to have a meeting with reputable members of the forum such as CK and Kano to discuss SPV and empty block mining and how it is harming the network.

The only reason any negative trust rating from dogie would ever bother me is if a nub who isn't familiar with dogie's bad advice took my trust rating as something they should go by when everyone knows how dogie is. Everyone knows he doesn't put any effort into research and has little electrical experience. He quotes numbers from manufacturers he likes.

Now I'd be wiling to bet he PMd macbook and offered that piece of advice.

But I don't care, and I will continue to warn people among my many other efforts against F2pool. I do not consider everyone who mines there an idiot as it is obvious to me many people just do not know, or do not understand what they are doing and how bad it is.

Unfortunately, there are also many people who do know, and continue out of greed. However nothing will deter people from learning and making a conscious decision to stay there or move to other pools.

Today I saw posts from new miners with many terahash who simply did not understand and after a bit of talking they did their own looking around, they checked previous posts by other forum members, and they went online to count the empty blocks for themselves when we had a huge backlog in the mempool and those smart new miners picked up right away what was going on and moved to kano.is.

That is exactly what is so fantastic about bitcoin. Each miner can have an impact with their hashrate.

Someone asked Johnybravo today about this. They said what can they do to help remove support from F2pool and Johny told them, you already have. When you move your hashrate to a pool who doesn't practice these things which harm bitcoin you have shown them. Believe it, every terahash counts and shows them we are not going to take this.

We are not going to continue to allow F2pool to hurt bitcoin. Things are looking bright and our baby is walking, albeit with trembling steps at times, and even with pools like F2pool who are so greedy and self-absorbed they will do anything to take, take, and take again by pushing the baby down, our little toddler jumps back up with each miner who pulls support from their evil, destructive grasp.

Tell your friends, tell everyone you know involved in bitcoin in any way, and push on because every miner and user needs your help. The only way bitcoin can succeed in the mainstream is if we show the world the bad actors are under control, the network is secure, and you can mine, buy, and spend bitcoin all day everyday without fear some evil Chinese pool is going to destroy what so many people have lived to build.

See my sig for details regarding how F2pool is threatening to send denial of service attacks to a small pool which will harm every miner in that pool.

Remember, this is a vote, and vote with your power no matter how big or small. Then they will listen, or go down, but you have the power to make it happen, even with very little hashrate, you can do it.

[philipma1957]

This is going to become a huge problem, if it isn't already. Miner pools/farms with lot of power are going to define terms on how its going to be and NO miners won't join the smaller pools, they want their ROI and don't care about what happens to future of Bitcoin. And the image above shows that not only them some of the others are doing it too.

I have been thinking that the 1/2 ing will alter this behaviour.

12.5 coins per block will mean fees are more important.

If I win a block with 25.1 coins including fees.  The fees come to .4%

If I win a block with 12.9 coins including fees. The fees come to .8%

I think this issue may really change in July.
My fear is the pools will reject more transactions by wanting even higher fees.
I stopped mining at f2pool after studying the issues.
I may need to sell off my s-7 hash at ant pool since ant pool is making a shit ton of empty blocks.

I will need to study this more.

[sloopy]

Phil I agree with most of your points.
F2pool has been selective of the transactions they will process, and mining empty blocks means they have selected 0 for that block.
Their reasoning is because they are behind the GFW, but look at the pools running CKpool. They are not only mining blocks with large amounts of transactions they are doing it as fast as every SPV mining pool but one and with less orphans than the others, much larger pools. This is absolute proof you can mine without using SPV mining methods, or blocks with zero transactions and still make the coin you should be making and in many cases much more. I have long been a ckpool software supporter and learning these things justified my choices.

I think the truth will be even harder for zero transaction pools to deny after the halving. Whether they continue to only care about the block reward over the health and security of the network, well I believe they will. I think the 12.5 will still be way more important because even though the transaction fees would rise in a natural progression because of the nature of how it was originally set up and has been maintained, it still offers them much more greed satisfaction when submitting solved blocks.

I think they are going for as much control so that when the halving occurs they can set the rate for transactions, as you said, but I also think they will take every opportunity to continue zero block transactions unless they are able to cause a huge price increase for a transaction to be processed.

Many miners do not yet see what F2pool and antpool are doing today which is to control as much of the network as possible so they may dictate the rules and future bitcoin core BIPs.
With all of my heart I believe these pools work in collusion to control the network.

I remember macbook-air posting he received a phone call within a few minutes of antpool and f2pool building on the wrong fork during the fork of july when they were pumping out more blocks on the wrong fork. He said it was a call from antpool. They already have a hotline setup to assist each other if their SPV mining causes another issue, so why would anyone think they aren't working together to exercise even more control in other ways? 60% of the bitcoin network is an enormous amount. We should consider why Kano said he will never allow more than 10% of the network at kano.is
Who has bitcoin's best interests at heart from that statement alone?

It is sad f2pool refuse to meet honest miners at a sit down to discuss this and other illegal items like denial of service threats.

I sincerely hope there is not a question in anyone's mind regarding the end game of these pools. Control and currency. That is all that matters to them. It will be a sad day to see the entire bitcoin network placed in harm's way because together F2pool and antpool will ruin mining for everyone simply based on the greed mining methods they employ.

A very sad day to see them controlling so much of the bitcoin network hash, and it will catch up to them, no matter the cost in underhanded methods they will continue and will receive too much attention.

[macbook-air]

What some people said in this thread not true. Only data tells, top 20+ blocks with the most transactions were all mined by F2Pool. Top 1000+ blocks with the largest size in bytes were also all mined by F2Pool. We are helping the network a lot by confirming far less spams in compare to other pools. We do mine a small number of empty blocks, but despite of that, you tx is still most likely to be confirmed by our pool than, say, Kano’s. As our great leader Chairman Xi has taught us: 「有些吃飽了撐的沒事幹的歪果仁，對我們的事情指手畫腳。我們一不輸出革命，二不輸出飢餓和貧困，三不去折騰你們，你們還有什麼好說的？」

[kano]

What some people said in this thread not true. Only data tells, top 20+ blocks with the most transactions were all mined by F2Pool. Top 1000+ blocks with the largest size in bytes were also all mined by F2Pool. We are helping the network a lot by confirming far less spams in compare to other pools. We do mine a small number of empty blocks, but despite of that, you tx is still mostly like to be confirmed by our pool than, say, Kano's. As Chairman Xi has taught us: 「有些吃飽了沒事幹的歪果仁，對我們的事情指手畫腳。我們一不輸出革命，二不輸出飢餓和貧困，三不去折騰你們，你們還有什麼好說的？」

Lulz you do realise how silly that comment is right?

You mine something like 40x the number of blocks kano.is does.

Guess what? Yes you confirm more transactions that kano.is does.

Wow that was unexpected ... ... ... ... ...

Try supplying some statistically useful information next time like your average block size or average number of transactions per block.
You know, the actual information that's relevant.

Here's some useful information
Last 80 block changes, comparing the time a pool found it vs the time other pools did their block change (seconds):

Code:

stratum.kano.is:3333        1.8629615643086
stratum.f2pool.com:3333     2.1109365130228

Yeah that says that kano.is, that does FULL block verification and produces blocks with transactions every time, put out the block change work FASTER than stratum.f2pool.com, that is SPV mining empty blocks.

Why are you SPV mining?
Seems you want to confirm an average LESS transactions per block.

[sloopy]

Transactions with average fees were sitting in the mempool waiting for a block.
F2pool chose to mine empty blocks rather than allow the transactions to be processed.
Almost Half of the empty blocks mined in the past 24 hours were mined by F2pool

[macbook-air]

What some people said in this thread not true. Only data tells, top 20+ blocks with the most transactions were all mined by F2Pool. Top 1000+ blocks with the largest size in bytes were also all mined by F2Pool. We are helping the network a lot by confirming far less spams in compare to other pools. We do mine a small number of empty blocks, but despite of that, you tx is still mostly like to be confirmed by our pool than, say, Kano's. As Chairman Xi has taught us: 「有些吃飽了沒事幹的歪果仁，對我們的事情指手畫腳。我們一不輸出革命，二不輸出飢餓和貧困，三不去折騰你們，你們還有什麼好說的？」

Lulz you do realise how silly that comment is right?

You mine something like 40x the number of blocks kano.is does.

Guess what? Yes you confirm more transactions that kano.is does.

Wow that was unexpected ... ... ... ... ...

Try supplying some statistically useful information next time like your average block size or average number of transactions per block.
You know, the actual information that's relevant.

Here's some useful information
Last 80 block changes, comparing the time a pool found it vs the time other pools did their block change (seconds):

Code:

stratum.kano.is:3333        1.8629615643086
stratum.f2pool.com:3333     2.1109365130228

Yeah that says that kano.is, that does FULL block verification and produces blocks with transactions every time, put out the block change work FASTER than stratum.f2pool.com, that is SPV mining empty blocks.

Why don’t you benchmark on your mining server itself? Otherwise your block change could be 0.0000000000000 seconds.

[kano]

Those stats are provided by someone who recently helped you configure your network

[macbook-air]

Those stats are provided by someone who recently helped you configure your network

I think you are refering http://poolbench.antminer.link/ Didn’t you see stratum-us.f2pool.com:3333 is the number 1?

[kano]

Those stats are provided by someone who recently helped you configure your network

I think you are refering http://poolbench.antminer.link/ Didn’t you see stratum-us.f2pool.com:3333 is the number 1?

Don't you see where the non-us f2pool stratum is?

[macbook-air]

Those stats are provided by someone who recently helped you configure your network

I think you are refering http://poolbench.antminer.link/ Didn’t you see stratum-us.f2pool.com:3333 is the number 1?

Don't you see where the non-us f2pool stratum is?

Lightsword’s poolbench server is located in the U.S. that is why you have a slightly better benchmark. And I recommend you block their IP 104.236.153.108 as well, because it is also “dead mining” on your pool. In that case, you’ll have infinite seconds that must be better than us all.

[kano]

Those stats are provided by someone who recently helped you configure your network

I think you are refering http://poolbench.antminer.link/ Didn’t you see stratum-us.f2pool.com:3333 is the number 1?

Don't you see where the non-us f2pool stratum is?

Lightsword’s poolbench server is located in the U.S. that is why you have a slightly better benchmark.

Slightly, ok, I'm 247ms ahead.
So I presume you are implying that it takes longer than that on average to get to your china node?
How much longer?
Double that? Yeah lets take a ridiculously high silly guess of 500ms.
That would mean that your SPV empty block changes are about 250ms faster than kano.is fully verified transaction block changes.

So the security of the bitcoin network and the risk of damaging the future of the bitcoin network is worth less than 250ms?

And I recommend you block their IP 104.236.153.108 as well, because it is also “dead mining” on your pool.

Well you're the one who listed the site not me
He's not SPV mining from data at kano.is ... though if you can find where he has said he is SPV mining (like you have stated regularly) on any server anywhere I'll gladly block his pool statistics miner also.

In that case, you’ll have infinite seconds that must be better than us all.

Heh now resorting to stupid comments because your SPV excuses are actually not valid

[OneInchWonder]

could this why i cant get a Transaction completed?

https://blockchain.info/tx/eeecfa55cf46c03d523c3a33c729e9a3b18c97987c24adb162ffffa1d03d9fca

[MRKLYE]

I remember when this happened a while back when the ghash.io pool had grown to large proportions and was threatening (or did) have over 50% of the staking power. People were up in arms about the whole matter and I remember many suspecting that they were doing 51% attacks or some other nonsense. Although You are right it is likely best that we distribute the hashing power rather than all lump to one pool, Granted that people are greedy.

What other alternatives exist for people to mine at?

[kano]

could this why i cant get a Transaction completed?

https://blockchain.info/tx/eeecfa55cf46c03d523c3a33c729e9a3b18c97987c24adb162ffffa1d03d9fca

Depends on how busy the network is and the fee you used.
Since F2Pool put up their fee level, you might find that is part of the cause yes.