[4+ EH] Slush Pool (slushpool.com); Overt AsicBoost; World First Mining Pool

[btiAndy]

Yeah in hindsight now and thinking about this more clearly something really stinks about this explanation from Slush. He is really not coming clean at all here.

For months we have been watching this cycle and have made repeated attempts to communicate this pattern to him for explanation. Nothing. Now he is basically saying that this particular miner was "accidentally" withholding blocks and that the problem has been fixed...and in fact he knows it has been fixed as that same miner has since the repair cracked two blocks... just not right and not near enough.

Slush should have banned that miner immediately (there must be a way to do this) and made an attempt to recover lost funds to return to those of us who stuck with him for so long. I have been gone from Slush for a few weeks now (actually stopped mining all together as there is no suitable outlet for a small scale miner like me anymore), Slush has definitely soured me on BTC mining as a result though.

Really rotten.

As was explained earlier, you cannot simply ban somebody immediately.  You don't really know someone is performing a block withholding attack until a large number of hashes have been produced without a block solution.  Plenty of pools regularly suffer through long rounds - it is the nature of mining.  It goes to follow, then, that an individual miner also suffers the same.  Kano suggested 10 blocks earlier.  At that point, the chances of it being "luck" are exceptionally minimal.  Unfortunately, 250BTC have been lost to the miner.

OK Fair enough, thank you for the explanation. I am not sure on the time frame though required for analysis with regard to Kano's explanation.I am sure I am sounding too simplistic and like a "Noob" but my question still stands, ..how long should it take to expose a withholding attack under these circumstances? At Slush this has been going on for at least 3 months in my practical opinion...we saw it repeatedly that when Slush dipped down to ca. 33 PH  the blocks started hitting, the minute we returned to 40PH+ all of a sudden performance went south. In simple terms, it seemed that when one big miner left the pool things would return to "normal", when he returned it went to hell.   just from a standpoint of analyzing a pattern of events should Slush not have been able to pick up on this pattern and figured out where the problem was?

Still curious...

[1714248555]

1714248555

[btiAndy]

And one last thing, I must say I really enjoy reading your posts Jonny and I have learned a lot over the past few months from your posts...I just want to clarify my statement in my previous post regarding banning the offending miner; I did not mean ban the miner in advance...I think the bad part here is that Slush has stated he contacted this miner after discovering the issue and the solution was simply to "fix" the "unintentional" problem and let this miner continue mining without penalty...no matter if the act was intentional or non-intentional I think those of us who were affected by this problem should have been respected a bit more.

Of course I am speaking from a "blue-sky" customer service standpoint and nothing more, I am sure that legally Slush owes his miners no real duty of service and is not obligated  in any way to compensate miners for wasted time and hash on his pool...it is gambling in the end and we should all know that. I am just saying that for the common good this offending miner who has been supposedly identified by Slush as the cause of the withholding attack should have been removed from the mining pool as consideration to the other miners still there.

[jonnybravo0311]

To address the concerns in your first reply... it's a tough bit of analysis.  In an ideal world, if the pool at 40PH was experiencing the same luck as the pool at 33PH, then it would be apparent that 7PH was withholding blocks.  If all 7PH belonged to a single miner, you found your culprit.  Unfortunately, the problem remains: you must wait some period of time before you are relatively certain that the miner isn't just unlucky.  I'm not sure how many, if any, pool operators have written this kind of analytics into their code.  It's a pretty simple bit of analysis: count shares submitted by miner vs number of block solutions.  If number of shares is some percentage over expectations, flag as potential block withholding.

That doesn't solve it, but merely alerts the pool operator something might be amiss.  Now the pool operator has to take action.  What action the operator takes is really the basis of your second reply.  Personally, I don't agree with Slush's decision to allow the miner to continue on his pool without any kind of repercussions.  "Sorry, my bad!" just doesn't cut it.  Intentional or not, if a miner is going to write his own custom firmware, that miner should be testing it on a simulated environment, not forcing the public to assume the risks of untested code.  I'm glad for the miners on the pool that the problem was found and addressed; however, if I were a miner on the pool, I'd be seriously considering going elsewhere if neither the offending miner, nor the pool operator were held accountable in some fashion.

[bctmke]

I am just glad I left the pool a few months back before I realized how bad it was (I had happened to get lucky and come across Kano's pool and I liked the transparency far better so I switched over).

[welshy82]

7 hours a block

Current Round Duration   05 hrs at 46.70 Ph/s

Current time   2016-02-09 18:01:05
Current Round Start:   2016-02-09 12:46:51
Current Round Duration   05:14:21
Current Shares CDF:   74.35%
Current Bitcoin block, difficulty:   397583, 144116447847
Pool Luck (1 day, 7 days, 30 days):   91%, 125%, 95%
Total Shares in the Round:   196092066752
Pool Effective Hash Rate (30 min average):   46.70 Ph/s

time to leave slushes and goto kanos pool

[ohmygod21]

7 hours a block

Current Round Duration   05 hrs at 46.70 Ph/s

Current time   2016-02-09 18:01:05
Current Round Start:   2016-02-09 12:46:51
Current Round Duration   05:14:21
Current Shares CDF:   74.35%
Current Bitcoin block, difficulty:   397583, 144116447847
Pool Luck (1 day, 7 days, 30 days):   91%, 125%, 95%
Total Shares in the Round:   196092066752
Pool Effective Hash Rate (30 min average):   46.70 Ph/s

time to leave slushes and goto kanos pool

just now pool luck 124% / 1 day with no block found so there is a serioussssssss problem

jumped from 91 % at 124 % with no block found between your post welshy

Someone is stealing blocks for sure .

Edit1 , now just founded a block and 124% > 127% /day

Edit2 redrop to 96% /day , 1 hour later -_-


I m done with this pool , just leaving to kano after the end of my last rent .

[disclaimer201]

I have to say I now agree with previous posters that something is fishy. We need more transparency and the issue has been going on for far too long. I have some dark thoughts/fears that the mining pool could have been hacked in the recent past (this would not be for the first time) and that the ominous miner is Slush himself to mine back lost funds. Not sure if that would make any sense though 

[bittalc1]

I have to say I now agree with previous posters that something is fishy. We need more transparency and the issue has been going on for far too long. I have some dark thoughts/fears that the mining pool could have been hacked in the recent past (this would not be for the first time) and that the ominous miner is Slush himself to mine back lost funds. Not sure if that would make any sense though 

We all can speculate, but its not fair that we lost all that electricity and not earning shit because of this operator wants to keep things in dark. From the start i mined there but after i saw that the luck is 150℅ and we found two blocks only!! I mean WTF we are not sheeps we can see the deal here! Some fucktard is stealing and hideing his trails...

[welshy82]

i would of thought he would come on and at least say something about what has happend rather than ignor everyone and not giving a explanation

[welshy82]

slush was Last Active:   October 06, 2015, 01:18:06 PM

[bittalc1]

slush was Last Active:   October 06, 2015, 01:18:06 PM

T
Yea i mean that is the deal. From us he is earning ~50K $ monthly and he has some serious mind condition that he is not able to come to this forum and give some small explanation. I mean wtf my mind is not stupid enough to understand his explaining that he wont participate in this forum that is making a lot of money for him.

Edit: my mind also cant process the last bullshit that some random miner done the bad luck in last months!!!

[btiAndy]

I notice Slush has not bothered to update anything on Facebook since his announcement either. I am still shocked that there is not more anger about the fact that this "unintentional miner" is being allowed to continue on mining as if nothing has happened...dheinz57 said it right, offending miner should be responsible for his custom firmware no matter if t was a genuine mistake.

[ShrykeZ]

I notice Slush has not bothered to update anything on Facebook since his announcement either. I am still shocked that there is not more anger about the fact that this "unintentional miner" is being allowed to continue on mining as if nothing has happened...dheinz57 said it right, offending miner should be responsible for his custom firmware no matter if t was a genuine mistake.

I am more shocked that people are still happy to continue mining here after all the obvious problems that have been on going for a prolonged time.

[krisgt30]

According to the calculators that seem to be the standard here, on the current difficulty at 40ph, this pool should be generating a block every 4 hours (3 and change on last difficulty). Looking back at the historical block timestamps, I highly doubt all those 8+ hour chunks with no blocks were all bad luck at that hash rate. To be quite honest, it is WAY more than 250BTC that was withheld. I wouldnt be surprised if it was in the thousands per year.

[kano]

According to the calculators that seem to be the standard here, on the current difficulty at 40ph, this pool should be generating a block every 4 hours (3 and change on last difficulty). Looking back at the historical block timestamps, I highly doubt all those 8+ hour chunks with no blocks were all bad luck at that hash rate. To be quite honest, it is WAY more than 250BTC that was withheld. I wouldnt be surprised if it was in the thousands per year.

Yes the 250BTC is the absolute minimum to have LOW confidence that someone is withholding.

Not finding a block for 10 Network diff is very rare.
0.99995460007024  1000.000%  1 in 22026.5

That would of course mean he was paying attention to individual miner block statistics and caught them out VERY early.

[simonpeter35]

Let's move on.

What is the best pool, beside Kano. On the comparison page, Kano only have 6 blocks.

[ohmygod21]

actually 2 blocks - 14 hours . at 46 - 48 ph lol

another day with mega rounds

edit : just cracked a new block : time between last : 8 h 30

[Legacy2005]

Let's move on.

What is the best pool, beside Kano. On the comparison page, Kano only have 6 blocks.

what page are you seeing this on? kano definitely worth checking out.

[d57heinz]

Slush pool seems to have turned into a honeypot to help the big companies succeed in killing off all the small miners on his pool.  Its rather funny that the pool is back to crazy long stretches of bad luck again after slush says its fixed.. Problem i have with this pool is you wont know something is wrong unless you figure it out yourself..  Slush making hand over fist in btc per month with his fees.. he dont give two shits about us.. As long as his ferrari has gas he is good to go! slush went down hill when he showed support for the 8mb bitcoin XT crap.  He gladly was all for more centralization so that the big boys can take this over.. He got constant backlash, ddos attacks, and im sure they tried to penetrate slush servers! Question is did they succeed and now slush has to refill his stash??  So if you ask me slush has been compromised by someone bigger than we know.  Whether he was robbed and is getting it back thru hiding blocks or will just let the 10 ph miner continue to rob the remaining miners.  How will slush know when the miner is having a bad stretch or went back to his bad firmware.. I find it funny that if it was custom firmware. then it was on a ton of miners and would have taken a shitload time to reflash them all. Or someone made a proxy that withheld blocks which is more likely!  This stinks to high hell!!  and the silence from the "captain" is golden.. Maybe he went down with the ship! LMAO

best Regards
d57heinz

[trickyriky]

Slush pool seems to have turned into a honeypot to help the big companies succeed in killing off all the small miners on his pool.  Its rather funny that the pool is back to crazy long stretches of bad luck again after slush says its fixed.. Problem i have with this pool is you wont know something is wrong unless you figure it out yourself..  Slush making hand over fist in btc per month with his fees.. he dont give two shits about us.. As long as his ferrari has gas he is good to go! slush went down hill when he showed support for the 8mb bitcoin XT crap.  He gladly was all for more centralization so that the big boys can take this over.. He got constant backlash, ddos attacks, and im sure they tried to penetrate slush servers! Question is did they succeed and now slush has to refill his stash??  So if you ask me slush has been compromised by someone bigger than we know.  Whether he was robbed and is getting it back thru hiding blocks or will just let the 10 ph miner continue to rob the remaining miners.  How will slush know when the miner is having a bad stretch or went back to his bad firmware.. I find it funny that if it was custom firmware. then it was on a ton of miners and would have taken a shitload time to reflash them all. Or someone made a proxy that withheld blocks which is more likely!  This stinks to high hell!!  and the silence from the "captain" is golden.. Maybe he went down with the ship! LMAO

best Regards
d57heinz

there is also a slim chance slush is allowing new tech to be trailed on slush pool, helping with software coding maybe, if thats the case, he really should open a 2nd private pool for this, slush is now my failover pool from my own