I'm the unluckiest lucky person in the world

[DamienBlack]

So I did the math and given difficulty increases, I was fairly confidant that I would never solve a block with my current hashing power. Working with a pool I expected the limit of bitcoins I would ever make would be between 25 and 35. It seemed that if I solo mined, there was a > 70% chance that I would never solve a single block.

And then I hit one. I was thinking, oh man, guess I got lucky, too bad, hindsight, still unlikely blah blah blah. And then I hit another one...

So now I could have mined 100+ bitcoins, but instead I'll only ever mine about 30. Luck is a cruel, cruel mistress. I still think I made the right choice... maybe.

[1713559504]

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[hugolp]

Murphy's law: If you would have gone solo, you would have not founded them.

[triforcelink]

Murphy's law: If you would have gone solo, you would have not founded them.

+666

[MacRohard]

So I did the math and given difficulty increases, I was fairly confidant that I would never solve a block with my current hashing power. Working with a pool I expected the limit of bitcoins I would ever make would be between 25 and 35. It seemed that if I solo mined, there was a > 70% chance that I would never solve a single block.

And then I hit one. I was thinking, oh man, guess I got lucky, too bad, hindsight, still unlikely blah blah blah. And then I hit another one...

So now I could have mined 100+ bitcoins, but instead I'll only ever mine about 30. Luck is a cruel, cruel mistress. I still think I made the right choice... maybe.

Actually I think there's a fairly simple explanation for this.

The only way the mining pools can tell if you're cheating them is by randomly sending you a range of work to solve that they already know contains a coin and make sure that you actually find it. Perhaps they do this more frequently when you first join the pool.

[Synaptic]

So I did the math and given difficulty increases, I was fairly confidant that I would never solve a block with my current hashing power. Working with a pool I expected the limit of bitcoins I would ever make would be between 25 and 35. It seemed that if I solo mined, there was a > 70% chance that I would never solve a single block.

And then I hit one. I was thinking, oh man, guess I got lucky, too bad, hindsight, still unlikely blah blah blah. And then I hit another one...

So now I could have mined 100+ bitcoins, but instead I'll only ever mine about 30. Luck is a cruel, cruel mistress. I still think I made the right choice... maybe.

Actually I think there's a fairly simple explanation for this.

The only way the mining pools can tell if you're cheating them is by randomly sending you a range of work to solve that they already know contains a coin and make sure that you actually find it. Perhaps they do this more frequently when you first join the pool.

Also, that probability will still throw huge gains at an agent, followed by an equally brutal dearth of gains, over time.

Look at the incredible luck MtRed mining pool had early on.  They're likely in for a long walk of shame when few/no blocks show up for an entire difficulty tier...

[DamienBlack]

So I did the math and given difficulty increases, I was fairly confidant that I would never solve a block with my current hashing power. Working with a pool I expected the limit of bitcoins I would ever make would be between 25 and 35. It seemed that if I solo mined, there was a > 70% chance that I would never solve a single block.

And then I hit one. I was thinking, oh man, guess I got lucky, too bad, hindsight, still unlikely blah blah blah. And then I hit another one...

So now I could have mined 100+ bitcoins, but instead I'll only ever mine about 30. Luck is a cruel, cruel mistress. I still think I made the right choice... maybe.

Actually I think there's a fairly simple explanation for this.

The only way the mining pools can tell if you're cheating them is by randomly sending you a range of work to solve that they already know contains a coin and make sure that you actually find it. Perhaps they do this more frequently when you first join the pool.

I thought mining pool could simply check the nonce I send with their block hash to ensure it is a valid share (at the minimum difficulty), proving that I'm doing work. I don't think they need such tricks.

[hugolp]

Also, that probability will still throw huge gains at an agent, followed by an equally brutal dearth of gains, over time.

Look at the incredible luck MtRed mining pool had early on.  They're likely in for a long walk of shame when few/no blocks show up for an entire difficulty tier...

If I am not mistaken bitcoin probability is independent from round to round.

[DamienBlack]

Also, that probability will still throw huge gains at an agent, followed by an equally brutal dearth of gains, over time.

Look at the incredible luck MtRed mining pool had early on.  They're likely in for a long walk of shame when few/no blocks show up for an entire difficulty tier...

If I am not mistaken bitcoin probability is independent from round to round.

You aren't mistaken. The original poster was probably just talking in karmic terms.

[Synaptic]

Also, that probability will still throw huge gains at an agent, followed by an equally brutal dearth of gains, over time.

Look at the incredible luck MtRed mining pool had early on.  They're likely in for a long walk of shame when few/no blocks show up for an entire difficulty tier...

If I am not mistaken bitcoin probability is independent from round to round.

You're mistaken. It doesn't matter if each round is discreet. Our probability will always reach a natural distribution.

Unless someone trapped the hashing equivalent of Maxwell's Demon inside one of their GPUs...

[DamienBlack]

Also, that probability will still throw huge gains at an agent, followed by an equally brutal dearth of gains, over time.

Look at the incredible luck MtRed mining pool had early on.  They're likely in for a long walk of shame when few/no blocks show up for an entire difficulty tier...

If I am not mistaken bitcoin probability is independent from round to round.

You're mistaken. It doesn't matter if each round is discreet. Our probability will always reach a natural distribution.

Unless someone trapped the hashing equivalent of Maxwell's Demon inside one of their GPUs...

Yes, but it is just like rolling a die. The probability will reach a natural distribution, but just because you got three 6's in a row doesn't mean that you are more likely to go on a stretch without 6's in the future.

[Synaptic]

Also, that probability will still throw huge gains at an agent, followed by an equally brutal dearth of gains, over time.

Look at the incredible luck MtRed mining pool had early on.  They're likely in for a long walk of shame when few/no blocks show up for an entire difficulty tier...

If I am not mistaken bitcoin probability is independent from round to round.

You're mistaken. It doesn't matter if each round is discreet. Our probability will always reach a natural distribution.

Unless someone trapped the hashing equivalent of Maxwell's Demon inside one of their GPUs...

Yes, but it is just like rolling a die. The probability will reach a natural distribution, but just because you got three 6's in a row doesn't mean that you are more likely to go on a stretch without 6's in the future.

I think you don't understand probability at all....lol.

[hugolp]

Also, that probability will still throw huge gains at an agent, followed by an equally brutal dearth of gains, over time.

Look at the incredible luck MtRed mining pool had early on.  They're likely in for a long walk of shame when few/no blocks show up for an entire difficulty tier...

If I am not mistaken bitcoin probability is independent from round to round.

You're mistaken. It doesn't matter if each round is discreet. Our probability will always reach a natural distribution.

Unless someone trapped the hashing equivalent of Maxwell's Demon inside one of their GPUs...

Yes, but it is just like rolling a die. The probability will reach a natural distribution, but just because you got three 6's in a row doesn't mean that you are more likely to go on a stretch without 6's in the future.

Probability is funny like that. I still find that it is counter-intuitive.

[bcearl]

Probability is funny like that. I still find that it is counter-intuitive.

Then something must be wrong with your intuition.

[MacRohard]

So I did the math and given difficulty increases, I was fairly confidant that I would never solve a block with my current hashing power. Working with a pool I expected the limit of bitcoins I would ever make would be between 25 and 35. It seemed that if I solo mined, there was a > 70% chance that I would never solve a single block.

And then I hit one. I was thinking, oh man, guess I got lucky, too bad, hindsight, still unlikely blah blah blah. And then I hit another one...

So now I could have mined 100+ bitcoins, but instead I'll only ever mine about 30. Luck is a cruel, cruel mistress. I still think I made the right choice... maybe.

Actually I think there's a fairly simple explanation for this.

The only way the mining pools can tell if you're cheating them is by randomly sending you a range of work to solve that they already know contains a coin and make sure that you actually find it. Perhaps they do this more frequently when you first join the pool.

I thought mining pool could simply check the nonce I send with their block hash to ensure it is a valid share (at the minimum difficulty), proving that I'm doing work. I don't think they need such tricks.

My understanding of how pooled mining works is;

The miners repeatidly request new work from the pool.
If they find a block then they submit the solution.

If they don't find any solution then they don't submit anything back.

Alot of miners will never find a solution to anything during the entire time that they're a member of the pool (but still receive regular payouts of course)

Unless the pools perform random spot checks on their miners by sometimes sending the same work that was recently found to contain a valid block, I don't see how they can tell the difference between someone repeatidly requesting more work and tossing it into /dev/null and someone actually working on it.

I haven't looked that much into pooled mining though so maybe I am missing something.

[DamienBlack]

You submit all of your share back. The shares are blocks that work at the "minimum difficulty", but not necessarily the "current difficulty". You get paid based on how many valid shares you produce compared to others. The shares can and are checked, and they prove you've been doing work. They don't just trust you on it.

The minimum difficulty requires several million hashes. The way we usually denote the current difficulty is by dividing it by the minimum difficulty to indicate how many shares you'd need to find, on average, as opposed to how many hashes.

[elggawf]

Yes, but it is just like rolling a die. The probability will reach a natural distribution, but just because you got three 6's in a row doesn't mean that you are more likely to go on a stretch without 6's in the future.

I think you don't understand probability at all....lol.

I think it's you who doesn't understand probability - go Google the Gambler's Fallacy to see why you're wrong.

[DamienBlack]

I think it's you who doesn't understand probability - go Google the Gambler's Fallacy to see why you're wrong.

Well, glad to see I'm not the only one who understands this. I thought this was common knowledge. Kids stuff. I found it odd that people were arguing with me. Welcome to the internet.

[MacRohard]

You submit all of your share back. The shares are blocks that work at the "minimum difficulty", but not necessarily the "current difficulty". You get paid based on how many valid shares you produce compared to others. The shares can and are checked, and they prove you've been doing work. They don't just trust you on it.

The minimum difficulty requires several million hashes. The way we usually denote the current difficulty is by dividing it by the minimum difficulty to indicate how many shares you'd need to find, on average, as opposed to how many hashes.

The only way they could check your share then would be to submit it to another miner (or reprocess it themselves I guess).. so almost the same thing but I guess they can do it on invalid blocks as well as valid ones.

[DamienBlack]

You submit all of your share back. The shares are blocks that work at the "minimum difficulty", but not necessarily the "current difficulty". You get paid based on how many valid shares you produce compared to others. The shares can and are checked, and they prove you've been doing work. They don't just trust you on it.

The minimum difficulty requires several million hashes. The way we usually denote the current difficulty is by dividing it by the minimum difficulty to indicate how many shares you'd need to find, on average, as opposed to how many hashes.

The only way they could check your share then would be to submit it to another miner (or reprocess it themselves I guess).. so almost the same thing but I guess they can do it on invalid blocks as well as valid ones.

No they check your share by doing that one hash, on the server. Just a single one. Even a crap card can do 5,000,000 hashes a second, so they have no problem checking all the hashes themselves. Basically, we search for sort of rare hashes, and submit them, they check them, proving that we are doing work (because they are indeed sort of rare) and sometimes it'll be a really rare hash that solver a block. Then everyone gets paid by how many sort of rare attempts they sent.

Because we only submit rare ones, they don't have to do very much work at all, we already weed out the vast majority, and they satisfy themselves that we really did work because otherwise we wouldn't have rare hashes to show them.

[Synaptic]

I think it's you who doesn't understand probability - go Google the Gambler's Fallacy to see why you're wrong.

Well, glad to see I'm not the only one who understands this. I thought this was common knowledge. Kids stuff. I found it odd that people were arguing with me. Welcome to the internet.

You're both dumb-asses.

The Gambler's Fallacy pertains to the FALLACY of believing in an INCREASED probability of a particular outcome based on past outcomes. I.E. believing that since the coin flipped heads 80/100 tosses that tails is SURELY due to come out ahead over the next 100 tosses.

This doesn't change the FACT that a coin flipped X number of times still maintains a 50/50 probability of being heads or tails. In a sufficiently large sample size, a natural distribution nearing a perfect 50/50 ratio will emerge.

Bitcoin hashing is ALSO such a distributed probability. In the example of MtRed, their probability of uncovering blocks at the same rate they had been is not diminished OR increased, it's just PROBABLE based on the natural distribution, that they will not maintain such luck, and will in fact over time see a smaller number of block awards over the same time frame as the distribution equalizes over the rest of the network.

Fucking bloody hell you wikipedians...

Take a fucking course in logic.