Watch out for Kano pool's 100% fees.

[greyworld]

 I thought I'd try Kano pool.  My experience with it was not great... which is fine, but then I tried to discuss it with Kano here and that's when things went really south.

What I was trying to figure out is 'Will I get paid if my per-block reward is less than 10k satoshi', because the website says the payments don't happen automatically, and Kano's posts here indicate 'this feature is in development' and that it will be done 'sometime around the return of Satanio' or something like that.  Basically, don't expect payment for blocks if the reward was less than 10k.

Which is... not great but whatever.  Talking about $1.50 here, not really that big of a deal.  Just tell me that so I can make my plans accordingly.  Still no direct answer to that.

Instead, when I mentioned how Antpool is paying better, and faster (both facts), Kano decides I'm shilling for Bitmain (despite me starting threads like 'Bitmain takes your money, does not ship product, DO NOT TRUST BITMAIN'), and says Antpool has higher fees.  Which is not true.  

To be clear:

Kano's Fees are 0.9%, PPLNS.

Antpools fees for PPLNS: 0%

And actually, Antpools fees for PPS are negative 5%.  And at the moment they have some sort of promotion where they pay you extra on top of that.  For me right now thats 16% extra.  Again, I am not a fan of Bitmain, but these are the facts, and it's very simple to check.

Anyways, I posted as much in a short message to Kano's thread, and he promptly deleted it.  I guess he needs to be deceptive to keep his pool going, so anyone laying out the facts has to be silenced.  I shrugged that off, and responded to someone else who said I needed to mine with Kano for 3-4 days to actually hit max payout by saying I don't like systems that require ongoing effort without reward based on the expectation that there will eventually be a reward because this is the same dynamic that keeps gamblers at the blackjack table losing their life savings... IIRC, the term for this is 'cognitive dissonance'.

I didn't say anything bad about Kano or his/her pool in that post, just that I don't like systems like that.  Post was promptly deleted.

So, because Kano apparently does not pay out small payments (which do add up, obviously), is misrepresenting the reality about the fees of his/her pool compared with others, and is actively trying to silence anyone saying anything remotely critical of this practice, I have to say 'Watch out for Kano pool'.

[greyworld]

To be fair, as Kano has pointed out, with PPLNS Antpool keeps the transaction fees, and Kano's pool does not.  So '0%' is not accurate, although they do clearly state this in their support document so it's not exactly deceptive, just greedy.

Still no answer about how / when / if 'dust' is paid out with Kano's pool though.

With my miner slugging away at 3.5-3.7 Th/s, every block payment was under the 10k payout limit.  He (she? whatever) has said numerous times 'You'll get that dust when hell freezes over', or roughly equivalent.  So for me, my 'fees' on Kano pool are roughly... 100%

So 0.9% is not exactly accurate either.

Maybe it's a good deal if you have a large miner farm, I wouldn't know.  Seems like requiring users to have considerable mining resources defeats the purpose of a mining pool, but your mileage may vary.

[greyworld]

Kano's reply to my question:

Yep dust mining here is indeed an unknown when you'll get paid out and until then, yep you could call it a 100% fee

[greyworld]

Here's Kano bragging about keeping $48k $68k of unpaid 'dust' payments

lulz $150 a day ... not anything like that ... ~$44 a day for 3 years (though of course it goes up and down ... now we only get ~2 blocks a day so on the lower end)
Total balance since Sep-2014 is something like 16BTC - including miners who had no payout addresses and got more than dust.
$48k at current prices in almost 3 years.

[greyworld]

Questions for Kano?  This is what you can expect:

You clearly are shilling for Bitmain.

I'll simply delete your posts.

Here's a post I started a couple days before trying to discuss my questions with Kano:

Topic: Bitmain takes your money, does not confirm payment, does not ship product
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2062789

Worst. Shill. Ever.

[greyworld]

I wrote some code that would handle dust payments, here it is.

Note that aside from template code Kano already has in place for other functionality with the site, the actual new code to handle dust payments is essentially four lines long.  It took me no more than 5 minutes.  "SQL->" represents "Send this SQL command to the SQL engine, however it is that you prefer to do that", not literal code.  

----

SQL->"SELECT DISTINCT userID FROM shifts"

// In PHP or whatever, loop through the results

SQL->"SELECT SUM(amount) AS dustTotal FROM shifts WHERE userID='".$row["userID"]."' AND amount<10000 AND paidOut=0"

// retrieve result row (using boiler plate code used on every page on his site)

//  Call the payout function he's already using

funcPayout($row["userID"], $row2["dustTotal"]);

// Either update it's status to paid...
SQL->"UPDATE shifts SET paidOut=1 WHERE userID='".$row["userID"]."' AND amount<10000"

// ...Or delete it...
SQL->"DELETE FROM shifts WHERE userID='".$row["userID"]."' AND amount<10000"

// ...But not both.

----

Maybe he uses flatfiles instead of SQL, but even then he already has a system in place to pull them based on a user selection and read the payout amount so it's largely the same idea even if that's the case.  Maybe there's some hoops to jump through to secure it more than above, sterilizing user input etc.  If so, he's already doing so elsewhere, again it's not new code.

Put this on a crontab and it'll happen daily, weekly, whatever.

Or it could be triggered by the user whenever they want, but that might require checking the volume and possibly applying a fee, which is also minor.

[greyworld]

I posted the code to make dust payments happen to his pool thread.

He deleted it.

[greyworld]

Here's another post he deleted, I thought it should be retained somewhere.

Here's the code to handle dust payouts.  Took 5 minutes.
...

It's wrong. Clearly you've never written code for anyone who must deal with 'money'

As I have said many times, and in those links you didn't bother to read, there's no accounting in the system.
It doesn't know what has been sent out ... as the Payments page states at the top .. and doesn't need to know, to do block payouts.
The current working process simply needs to work out the total shares in 5Nd++ and then divide each person's shares in that shift range by that total number.
Again as I have said here before, the bitcoin blockchain tracks all the payouts, so I need to write accounting based on the blockchain, not some random and incorrect sql.

In the past I have done manual payouts for some people, without any tracking in the pool, just logs, and again, they require accounting of the blockchain to be able determine the unpaid amount.
Put simply, as I have stated quite a number of times before and in those links, the pool requires accounting added to it ... which it will in the not too distant future as I have stated recently also.

Your statements don't add up.  The website is already showing me the payments it's not giving me.  Clearly you have access to that information.  And it's not based on the blockchain payments, because there was no payment (to me).   So no matter how it is that you figure out exactly how much money you're not paying out, you could simply do that again, and actually pay it out to people.  You've made the decision not to, and people need to be aware of that.

And I did read your other posts, they mostly read like the kind of rubbish that would result in me firing someone if they tried to explain a three year delay in critical functionality.  "Oh, we can't do that because something something <i>Orphan Blocks</i>.  You just wouldn't understand, only I understand, so shut up and give me your money!"

The rest of it, frankly, reads like you're laundering money for people.  People pool their miners, help you generate fresh coins, and in exchange, you give them small portions of other existing coins.  While you keep the newly minted coins.  Where did the old coins come from?  Where are the new coins going?  You could be laundering drug money for all we know.  And when the forensic accountants eventually get their act together and start unraveling the threads of this fiasco, who pays?  Your miners, when those old coins are retroactively seized.

When you talk about 'there is no accounting system yet, it needs added', how do you expect to go back over three years of payouts and figure out who gets what?  Obviously, you won't.  So you should just come out and admit that the unpaid 'dust' will never be paid out, instead of lying about it over and over again.

The code is right, I've posted it to my scam thread about your pool as well.  The only reason you've gotten away with this for as long as you have is you talk down at people you think don't know as much (or more) about coding.  Those days are numbered.  You need to get it together man, before you get dragged into court for fraud.  $50k+ is a considerable amount of money.

[greyworld]

I'm going to stop posting to his thread now, it's obviously not going anywhere (and I just noticed in the 'Deleted Post' notification that it expressly states I should stop posting to his thread if he's asked me to, which he did).

Kano pool users, I've done what I can.  It's up to you now.  Good luck.

[tbonetony]

With my miner slugging away at 3.5-3.7 Th/s, every block payment was under the 10k payout limit.  He (she? whatever) has said numerous times 'You'll get that dust when hell freezes over', or roughly equivalent.  So for me, my 'fees' on Kano pool are roughly... 100%

So 0.9% is not exactly accurate either.

Maybe it's a good deal if you have a large miner farm, I wouldn't know.  Seems like requiring users to have considerable mining resources defeats the purpose of a mining pool, but your mileage may vary.

I am not sure if you actually understand how kano pool works after all. I just can't tell from your lengthy complaint. Assuming you have maxed the 5Nd requirement as per pool faq page, you should expect 3.5T / 80000T (pool total) x 12.5 btc (raw reward) = 0.0005 per block. This is higher than the dust cutoff. If you were rewarded less than this by a wide margin, then either 1) your hash is much lower than 3.5T as you claimed; or 2) you haven't max'ed out 5Nd.

This is how kano pool works and the math behind it. Even kano cannot cheat around this, or we wouldn't be on the pool.

I guess he needs to be deceptive to keep his pool going, so anyone laying out the facts has to be silenced.  I shrugged that off, and responded to someone else who said I needed to mine with Kano for 3-4 days to actually hit max payout by saying I don't like systems that require ongoing effort without reward based on the expectation that there will eventually be a reward because this is the same dynamic that keeps gamblers at the blackjack table losing their life savings... IIRC, the term for this is 'cognitive dissonance'.

Current 5Nd should be about 2.5 days.

I can understand it's not possible to require every miner to be patient for such time frame, where I personally have no issue with, this could be found on faq page before you even start mining at this pool. and if timeliness is so critical to you, then antpool, or pool-hopping-proxy pools maybe are better choices for you. It's your preference.

I have electric bills to pay every month. what i do is i dedicate a small amount of hashes to other PPS pools to ensure i can meet the commitment, should kano pool suffers the worst possible luck. This is risk management, things can be done. Failure to use tools properly does not entitle tool inventers to be deceptive.

I wrote some code that would handle dust payments, here it is.

Note that aside from template code Kano already has in place for other functionality with the site, the actual new code to handle dust payments is essentially four lines long.  It took me no more than 5 minutes.  "SQL->" represents "Send this SQL command to the SQL engine, however it is that you prefer to do that", not literal code.  

----

SQL->"SELECT DISTINCT userID FROM shifts"

// In PHP or whatever, loop through the results

SQL->"SELECT SUM(amount) AS dustTotal FROM shifts WHERE userID='".$row["userID"]."' AND amount<10000 AND paidOut=0"

// retrieve result row (using boiler plate code used on every page on his site)

//  Call the payout function he's already using

funcPayout($row["userID"], $row2["dustTotal"]);

// Either update it's status to paid...
SQL->"UPDATE shifts SET paidOut=1 WHERE userID='".$row["userID"]."' AND amount<10000"

// ...Or delete it...
SQL->"DELETE FROM shifts WHERE userID='".$row["userID"]."' AND amount<10000"

// ...But not both.

----

Maybe he uses flatfiles instead of SQL, but even then he already has a system in place to pull them based on a user selection and read the payout amount so it's largely the same idea even if that's the case.  Maybe there's some hoops to jump through to secure it more than above, sterilizing user input etc.  If so, he's already doing so elsewhere, again it's not new code.

Put this on a crontab and it'll happen daily, weekly, whatever.

Or it could be triggered by the user whenever they want, but that might require checking the volume and possibly applying a fee, which is also minor.

And now it comes to this interesting part. While I stay neutral on kano's comment about you being no experience with building system as such, I surely can't give you much credit either. I trust you didn't spend more than 5 minutes laying down pseudo code like this, but you have totally ignored the architecture and design behind the running software. Anyone can say how one would think something works, but without understanding how pieces fit each other, it's nonsense, or garbage, at most.

5 minutes of logic flow does not equate to 5 minutes of work to get it into production. <-- I will stop here, assuming you know software engineering principles well enough.

various references to "facts"

I saw you have a lot of emphasis on being factual. Yes, I witnessed this story you had with kano and would agree that you did not evidently spiced it. BUT, please understand that facts can be conflicting too. Your fact does not equate to my fact all the time.

So, facts are only for supporting your argument. it does not entitle you to be righteous without question.

because, I have 80TH on kano pool. and I audit kano pool payout every week then find that: I pay 0.9% fee, e-v-e-r-y-t-i-m-e.

Now, do I have a comeback to finger point your signature that

Kanopool - The only pool with a 100% fee

I would not do so.

[greyworld]

I am not sure if you actually understand how kano pool works after all. I just can't tell from your lengthy complaint. Assuming you have maxed the 5Nd requirement as per pool faq page, you should expect 3.5T / 80000T (pool total) x 12.5 btc (raw reward) = 0.0005 per block. This is higher than the dust cutoff. If you were rewarded less than this by a wide margin, then either 1) your hash is much lower than 3.5T as you claimed; or 2) you haven't max'ed out 5Nd.

This is how kano pool works and the math behind it. Even kano cannot cheat around this, or we wouldn't be on the pool.

At the very least, Kano should state on the pool faq that miners with less power than 0.7T will simply never be paid at all, regardless of how much they max out said requirement.  No such statement exists that I noticed, maybe I'm wrong but now I don't like to go to his site because I don't like him having access to my IP.   Instead it says 'Do not point CPU / GPU miners to this pool'.

Why should I give Kano my power cost and reward for that ramp up period?  Why isn't that 'donation' (or theft, depending on how you want to phrase it) mentioned as part of the fees?  Saying the fees are 0.9% is deceptive and not accurate.  If that ramp period comes to 2.5 days, then that's 2.5 days of power cost gone and 2.5 days of reward gone, for me, about $20.  I should pay $20 for the 'privilege' of mining on his pool?  No thanks.

I think he uses that implied write-off as a method of coercing users into staying with his pool. 

Current 5Nd should be about 2.5 days.

I can understand it's not possible to require every miner to be patient for such time frame, where I personally have no issue with, this could be found on faq page before you even start mining at this pool.

"Be patient, I just want to rob you for a couple days, but then afterwords, oh man, it's going to be so great!"

And now it comes to this interesting part. While I stay neutral on kano's comment about you being no experience with building system as such, I surely can't give you much credit either. I trust you didn't spend more than 5 minutes laying down pseudo code like this, but you have totally ignored the architecture and design behind the running software. Anyone can say how one would think something works, but without understanding how pieces fit each other, it's nonsense, or garbage, at most.

5 minutes of logic flow does not equate to 5 minutes of work to get it into production. <-- I will stop here, assuming you know software engineering principles well enough.

Actually, my code example is totally unnecessary.  Here's why.  The clearly evident facts are:

Kano is already tracking payments under the payout threshhold.  The website lists them, and marks which ones won't be paid.  So that is already done.

Kano already has code to send payments to people.  Allegedly, I wouldn't know, this happens all the time.

So the new code required?  Add up the unpaid payments, and pay them.

He's put more effort into crook-splaining why he doesn't do this than it would take to actually do it.

I saw you have a lot of emphasis on being factual. Yes, I witnessed this story you had with kano and would agree that you did not evidently spiced it. BUT, please understand that facts can be conflicting too. Your fact does not equate to my fact all the time.

Well... my 'facts' are mostly just direct quotes from Kano.  This is not me putting words in his mouth, it's his own admission of not paying out 'dust' miners, keeping some portion of their payments, and ultimately that has added up to over $50k.  His words, not mine.  Maybe he's lying about it just to piss me off, I wouldn't rule that out.  But as it stands, he is pretty brazen about gloating about how much money he has skimmed off the top from users like yourself.

...because, I have 80TH on kano pool. and I audit kano pool payout every week then find that: I pay 0.9% fee, e-v-e-r-y-t-i-m-e.

Not true.  The 2.5 day ramp up time period you paid more than that 0.9%, according to your own statements above.  Likely, you also got robbed at some point for any time you failed to stay connected 100% of the time.

Now, do I have a comeback to finger point your signature that

Kanopool - The only pool with a 100% fee - "We stole $50k from our users!"

I would not do so.

You removed part of my sig so I filled it back in for you.  I'm curious why you would remove it.  Does it sting?  That's why I've done it.  For you, so hopefully you'll eventually get paid what's owed to you.  Do you think I care about the $1.40 Kano owes me?  Or the $5-$10 I lost in power costs trying his pool out?  Sure I'd like to get paid but at this point I'm just offended he gets away with robbing the people making him so much money.  It's not necessary.  He could just be honest and pay people what they're owed and still make a bucket of money.

[Iranus]

The $48,000 in dust payments were not that much at the time.  You could equally argue that if you bought $1,000 of drugs from a dark market when the price was $1, they owe you millions.

PS:  Antpool takes transaction fees.  Looking at this chart, you can see that with Antpool's hashrate they make shitloads of money.

[greyworld]

The $48,000 in dust payments were not that much at the time.  You could equally argue that if you bought $1,000 of drugs from a dark market when the price was $1, they owe you millions.

PS:  Antpool takes transaction fees.  Looking at this chart, you can see that with Antpool's hashrate they make shitloads of money.

Actually at today's rates, 16 BTC is $55k.  It doesn't matter if 'at the time' it wasn't much.  It's a lot now.  After three years of skimming off the top, it's made Kano quite a bit of money.

Frankly I have no idea what you're talking about with dark market drug money.  That's a very labored analogy.

And I already acknowledged that with PPLNS, Antpool keeps transaction fees, and that it's greedy and that advertising 0% rates for PPLNS is less than honest of them.  They do pay transaction fees out with PPS+ however, but then that has a 4% fee and it's PPS based so it's really totally different.  How Bitmain is ripping people off should be a totally different thread and I'd be happy to jump on that bandwagon, but this thread is talking about how Kano is robbing people.   Keeping those dust payments amounts to an unstated fee and it's heavily biased against people with the weakest hardware.  The less your miner makes, the more Kano keeps for himself.

Have you noticed how friendly Kano is if you're complying with his scam?  All you have to do is fork over those dust payments, help him make money with his pool, and talk smack about every other pool, and he'll be your best friend.  But if you have anything at all to say about it other than glowing reviews, he turns into a very hostile, defensive, and arrogant person?   If someone is only your friend while they are stealing from you, they're a con artist.

[o_solo_miner]

In one point I can agree with you:
It should be diplayed at wich amount of hashrate it is possible to mine without getting into a dust trap at the pool.

BUT:
I would never call him a thief!
He got that "dust" accounted on every user, you can see it if you look
in your account.
And he allways say he will pay it out to the user, if he ever finished the code for doing that automaticly.
As far as I know, Kano is preparing each Payout manualy, so it will be a big work for him to do also each dust!
During my stay at Kanopool I was happy, I chat with Kano and it was nice even we do not allways share the
same ideas. He could be rough, ok, that is Kano as we like him.
So simply I accept this and leave, because my hashrate is to low, but not because I do not trust Kano.

maybe later I will correct my bad english, so sorry about any typo.

[Xandrah]

Here's Kano bragging about keeping $48k of unpaid 'dust' payments

lulz $150 a day ... not anything like that ... ~$44 a day for 3 years (though of course it goes up and down ... now we only get ~2 blocks a day so on the lower end)
Total balance since Sep-2014 is something like 16BTC - including miners who had no payout addresses and got more than dust.
$48k at current prices in almost 3 years.

Keep away from the pool is the best action you can take.

[will]

Ok, so for what it's worth, here's my assumption from what I know of the man:

Kano will aggregate your dust payouts until they cross the non-dust payout threshold, then pay you. Pandering to anything below that would be "ridiculous, unsustainable marketing hoo-ha" if my spidey-sense is correct.

I suggest that you do not succumb to your knee-jerk reactions of "scam". Kano is direct and concise, even prickly at times, not to be mistaken for "incorrect", "unreasonable" or "scammy". Kano is always precise (to a fractional satoshi in my experience), and overtly so.

[greyworld]

Ok, so for what it's worth, here's my assumption from what I know of the man:

Kano will aggregate your dust payouts until they cross the non-dust payout threshold, then pay you. Pandering to anything below that would be "ridiculous, unsustainable marketing hoo-ha" if my spidey-sense is correct.

I suggest that you do not succumb to your knee-jerk reactions of "scam". Kano is direct and concise, even prickly at times, not to be mistaken for "incorrect", "unreasonable" or "scammy". Kano is always precise (to a fractional satoshi in my experience), and overtly so.

That is incorrect, those dust payments accumulate... in his wallet.  They've sat there for three years.  He 'occasionally manually pays some of them out' as he sees fit, or doesn't, shrug.

Kanopool subsidizes 'low fees' by ripping off the weakest miners in the pool.  The biggest members of the pool are indirectly profiting from the theft of what is due to the smaller contributors, in the form of lower fees for them.  It's 0.9% for the bigger, it's up to 100% for smaller.  Maybe that's why they have such glowing statements in his support... he's basically bribing them.

[727miner]

I haven't mined there for a while but I decided to go look at my payments page and see how much dust I had collecting out there...turned out to be 95 payments worth... 0.00196058 or about $6.50. I'm surprised he still hasn't paid out the dust to the users after all this time, especially given the substantial increase in value.

[greyworld]

I haven't mined there for a while but I decided to go look at my payments page and see how much dust I had collecting out there...turned out to be 95 payments worth... 0.00196058 or about $6.50. I'm surprised he still hasn't paid out the dust to the users after all this time, especially given the substantial increase in value.

Do you mind if I ask your total actual payments from using Kano pool?  I'm trying to figure out the percentage of those payments the unpaid amount represents.  Also, what Th/s did you mine at when at his pool?  Thanks.

[Grigorevich]

Besides from not informing mininum hashrate, they do not inform that if you don't state an address right away you will be DONATING btc to kano. Kano got some btc from me that way. And once contacting him, he was arrogant as usual.
These little things make me wanna leave kano. But unfortunately I cannot lie - I find their fee the best.
I'd love to mine at ckpool. I really like the 0% fee + block generation payout. The problem is I cannot trust them after ck threw away MONTHS of work over "code exploding" once a diff to find a block was found. He didn't even explain what happened nor grantee if it would happen again. Because of that, that pool is dead to me now unfortunately.

Till I find something better, I'm forced to stay at kano's