Multipool - the pool mining pool (with source code)

[organofcorti]

I guess I'm the only one who came out ahead - I lost 10000 shares, but got 105000 shares worth of coin for 90000 shares. I'm still 5000 shares ahead. I find it hard to believe this was designed to be a scam -  the math seemed to work out and I'd be surprised if Multipool wasn't using a real algo.

Withholding judgement until more info available. Although coming out ahead, I guess I can afford to.

First ever mining pool ponzi scheme?

I doubt it - the payoffs to early adopters were only around 10% more than for solo. If I were going to ponzi up a pool, I'd be paying out a bit more than that.

Could be wrong though - the OP was Multipool's first post under that name.

still to early to say it was scam.

+1

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[enmaku]

Fair enough, I was 50% joking anyway 

In all seriousness, though, I really hope it comes back up soon.

[organofcorti]

Fair enough, I was 50% joking anyway 

I was only 50% serious

In all seriousness, though, I really hope it comes back up soon.

another +1

[muyoso]

still to early to say it was scam. Also used it few days with several shutdowns. Get paid a little of my earnings allready(about 0,06 of 0,25), but why should anybody do this kind of programing work to achieve few day's bank, while he may make less for much lomger time? It is just too young project to make any conclusion. It can still be a hosting problem, as many developers uses "home housing" for the first phase of project(eg. before it makes enought to pay the profihousing for)

Believe me, I hope I am wrong.  If it is a server issue though, why wouldn't he pop in here and give an update?  Its been 30 hours now.  The only reason I am kinda quick to say "scam" is that I started mining about 16 hours before it went down for the last 30 hours without a word from the OP.  I hope it turns out that I am just an idiot.

[fpgaminer]

This is a very .... odd pool

Why did it default to its own proportional system as a fallback? That would fall prey to the same problems as all the other proportional pools it was trying to "game." The fallback method should be to submit to a PPS pool, or have its own local PPS system. The share utility on a PPS system is constant and known, so it makes a good fallback and a base line for minimum efficiency.

Given that, it should never have used score-based pools, unless the confidence was high that efficiency would be greater than the baseline set by PPS.

I'm almost tempted to clone this pool, but then I would feel dirty for gaming the proportional pools 

Thank god I used a unique password for this site.

Errr ... this pool doesn't require a password. The password you use is ignored and not used for anything, like eligius.

[tschaboo]

This is a very .... odd pool

Why did it default to its own proportional system as a fallback? That would fall prey to the same problems as all the other proportional pools it was trying to "game." The fallback method should be to submit to a PPS pool, or have its own local PPS system. The share utility on a PPS system is constant and known, so it makes a good fallback and a base line for minimum efficiency.

That's not odd that's ironic. It doesn't fall to the same problems because you can't pool hop his proportional "solo" pool because you can't choose which shares you get. Falling back to a PPS pool would be a bad idea. If you have a proportional pool without pool hopping the utility of each share will be 1. If you go to a PPS pool like deepbit you have a utility of 0.9 because of the 10% fees.

Given that, it should never have used score-based pools, unless the confidence was high that efficiency would be greater than the baseline set by PPS.

You are mixing up expected value and variance. This pool isn't about minimizing variance it's about maximizing utility. With number of shares towards infinity efficiency will be the same as utility.

BTW: A proportional pool is a score-based pool as well. Your score increases by 1 for every share and then you get your 50BTC / number of total score * your score. It doesn't matter what it's named. Either the calculation is vulnerable to pool hopping or not. If it is, there are times where your utility is >1 and times where it is <1. Even if it's only 1.001 (if there are no fees, of course) it's better than going solo (=1.0) or to deepbit (=0.9).

I'm almost tempted to clone this pool

Go ahead! But I think you need a quite deep understanding of probability and statistics to get it right. While I think that I understood it somehow (but I could be wrong, everything I wrote above could be nonsense), I couldn't do it.

but then I would feel dirty for gaming the proportional pools 

I would not. I'd say >90% of the miners frequent this forum and >90% of those read about the pool-hopping-problem at least once. If they are still mining in proportional pools it's because they don't care getting less ... or so ... I guess.

[tschaboo]

still to early to say it was scam. Also used it few days with several shutdowns. Get paid a little of my earnings allready(about 0,06 of 0,25), but why should anybody do this kind of programing work to achieve few day's bank, while he may make less for much lomger time? It is just too young project to make any conclusion. It can still be a hosting problem, as many developers uses "home housing" for the first phase of project(eg. before it makes enought to pay the profihousing for)

Believe me, I hope I am wrong.  If it is a server issue though, why wouldn't he pop in here and give an update?  Its been 30 hours now.  The only reason I am kinda quick to say "scam" is that I started mining about 16 hours before it went down for the last 30 hours without a word from the OP.  I hope it turns out that I am just an idiot.

Well, it might be a scam, but I still don't think so. He would have run away with ... hmmm ... 100 BTC? Of course, that's a lot, but not enough for a skilled person to get criminal.

Even if he wouldn't show up in a month, I still wouldn't call him a scammer without further evidence. Imagine, you or I open up a new ambitious pool, after a week in the hospital, after an accident, you finally come back to your favorite forum and all you read is "OMFG! This asshole stole my 20 cents!!!"....

I hope he'll be back soon and nothing bad happened after all. Of course I'd also like to see some coins for my 25000 unpaid shares 

[BombaUcigasa]

Did this shut down? Damn, I was hoping to join the meta-pool, when the second multi-pool pool would come online, someone could make a meta-pool, a pool that exclusively requests work from pools that request work from other pool...

[organofcorti]

..... until all the pools are metapools and all the internets explode.
 

[iopq]

Did this shut down? Damn, I was hoping to join the meta-pool, when the second multi-pool pool would come online, someone could make a meta-pool, a pool that exclusively requests work from pools that request work from other pool...

but only when the expected profit from the solo getworks is above one
since they'll use the same algorithm, both multipools would conclude it's best to solo mine at this junction, at which point the meta pool will request works from multi-pool when the proportional part of it has more than 1.0 utility 

[Multipool]

Amazing, I go away for a weekend, and everything is broken ! Good job guys!

My apologies to the miners, but if there is to be any blame, direct it where it is due: the VPS host has shutdown and deleted my instance, after they've conveniently misplaced the BTC payment for the next month I sent them last week. They've apologized and offered to put the server back up with an extra month free, but with none of the old data of course. Coincidentally, they've revamped their plan offerings this same week, so for the price I've paid I only get 75% cpu and 50% memory I used to have. My policy in life is to give people the benefit of the doubt, as I will in this case, but it does bear mentioning that I have read (with skepticism) many stories of people being "accidentally" whiped by their host whenever their legacy plan becomes unprofitable. Who knows!

I might restart Multipool later, but I would need to find the time to whip the blank VPS into proper shape. In the meantime, as I have allowed Multipool to get out of my hands, I feel it would be fair if I release the source code now, so that miners who liked Multipool can run an instance of their own. Download the files from github - written in Perl for Linux, but it is probably possible, by the right person, to modify the code to run on Windows as well. To start the pool, you'd only need to create and edit accounts.conf and bitcoind.conf files - see the readme file for instructions. The pool has all multi-user features enabled, but you can ignore those if all you care is pool failover balancing and hopping. See "utility_1" function for specific details of utility of mining in proportional pools.

As for the missing pool data, fortunately, I have... daily... backups of the database. Unfortunately those who have mined in the last day probably aren't in it. What would be the fair way to fill in the blanks - would miners assent if I distribute the last day's earnings to the miners in proportion equal to their previous day's work? Tough luck though for the guy with the thousand pending shares and one confirmed . There is also some extra money from eligius from the time the pool was sending shares to eligius-us but was being redirected to eligius-eu. Once I have the time for that, I'll try to see whom that should be paid out to.

[rb2k]

The Github repo is empty so far

[M4v3R]

There is a "Download" link where you can download Multipool.pl and README, but the pools.conf is corrupted/empty .

[iopq]

There is a "Download" link where you can download Multipool.pl and README, but the pools.conf is corrupted/empty .

I think you have to create it yourself

[organofcorti]

Hey, thanks Multipool. You get back up, I'll rejoin. In the meantime I'll try your source and see how I go. Time to join a few more pools 

[organofcorti]

...and I'm fine with your proposed repayment plan.

[Sukrim]

And now that the source is open, please everyone make sure to also build configs for smaller proportional pools and share them!

Edit: pools.conf is broken btw...
Even if you don't want to share ALL your regex code at least a few examples would be nice.

Also some possible improvements, to get around some issues of pools not displaying stats/intentionally faking stats (esp. GH/s)/heavily delaying stats:
2 Databases per pool:
* Displayed GH/s (via API/Website) logged every minute or so
* Calculated GH/s (via time it took to solve a block) every time a block was solved

With the 2nd Database you could do (if it's a bigger pool) some analysis if the average of last week for example falls within the expected variance of the displayed values or if it's completely off.

After this you can interpolate more or less and don't need to rely on guesses if the API/Website shows bogus data.

What also might be interesting would be to have Blockexplorer data on the result page and/or some nice RRDTool (or similar) Graphs.

Would be great if someone other than Multipool himself could take a look at this and help coding a real new Open Source metapool-backend!

[gentakin]

My apologies to the miners, but if there is to be any blame, direct it where it is due: the VPS host has shutdown and deleted my instance

WTF! Please tell us which host this is. Everyone should stop using it. Shutting down and deleting your instance without notice, that's just unacceptable.

I agree to your payout idea, though I'm afraid that I mined only a few shares on the last day (you are my backup pool), and all the shares I could on the day before (where it was my primary pool). So anything you pay to me I will happily send to muyoso.

[Multipool]

There is a "Download" link where you can download Multipool.pl and README, but the pools.conf is corrupted/empty .

Fixed the pools.conf link. First time using github, as you can see.

WTF! Please tell us which host this is. Everyone should stop using it. Shutting down and deleting your instance without notice, that's just unacceptable.

They did send notice. On Friday evening. And the server went down sometime Saturday/Sunday. Since I don't have proof of malicious intent, I am not going to libel them. Just something to be on the lookout for when VPS shopping.

[muyoso]

So just to get the timeline right, the pool shut down at 1pm on June 26th EST (5pm GMT), which was a Sunday afternoon.  We know this because there is a post in this thread stating as much.  The website is hosted out of Taiwan I believe, so that would mean it shut down at 1am Monday morning, June 27th local time.  Odd time to shut down a site, but whatever.

Am I understanding this correctly?

Edit:  And you received notice at least 24 hours prior to the pool shutting down on Friday the 24th of June during the evening in whatever time zone you are in.  You posted twice on the 25th and once on the 26th, neglecting both days to inform people of the potential issue?