Multipool and Middlecoin - big profit, even bigger troubles...

[claycoins]

The more general problem:

1.  There are, conceptually, an infinite number of coins

2.  The dollar average value of these coins will approach zero (finite amount of dollars / N as N approaches infinity)

3.  The average hash rate of these coins will approach zero (finite amount of hash / N as N approaches infinity)

So the end state:

-> Most coins will be highly vulnerable to attack

-> Most coins will trend toward a value of zero

-> Most speculators will get wiped out

Hit the nail on the head.  There has to be a reason for using a cryptocurrency over fiat, and for most of these currencies there is none or they offer no better option than Bitcoin.

[10bserver8]

It is not sufficient to mine a coin that you continually are rewarded in loss of expenses that can never be reclaimed.

If it is not profitable then it should hold some intrinsic value, like .bit or XPM if you want people with a good heart to invest their livelihood into it.

[GSnak]

Stop making clone coins that have zero innovation. If a coin has so little interest that there's only 30MH/s typically thrown at it then it doesn't need to exist. Multipools are the best things to happen to alts since Cryptsy. Without Cryptsy tens of people would still be clinging to the delusion that their pet crap coin was actually worth something. Without multipools there'd be no drive to produce an innovative coin with the fault tolerance necessary to withstand the abuse of a global market. If the next generation of alts can handle the rapid adoption of multipools then maybe they can handle an attack by a more determined player. Who knows, perhaps we'll be spared three page ANN threads for a "new" coin that disappears in 12 hours.

[erk]

Stop making clone coins that have zero innovation. If a coin has so little interest that there's only 30MH/s typically thrown at it then it doesn't need to exist. Multipools are the best things to happen to alts since Cryptsy. Without Cryptsy tens of people would still be clinging to the delusion that their pet crap coin was actually worth something. Without multipools there'd be no drive to produce an innovative coin with the fault tolerance necessary to withstand the abuse of a global market. If the next generation of alts can handle the rapid adoption of multipools then maybe they can handle an attack by a more determined player. Who knows, perhaps we'll be spared three page ANN threads for a "new" coin that disappears in 12 hours.

If coins adapt to multipools as you suggest, then the multipools will cease to be relevant, they will spend more time hopping, and less time mining, you will eventually be better off directly mining the coins. The only reason multipools work atm is because they know coins will stay at a certain diff for a number of blocks whilst they hammer them. As coins adapt it will just become a game of Whac-A-Mole.

[GSnak]

Yes.

[DrGoose]

... The only reason multipools work atm is because they know coins will stay at a certain diff for a number of blocks whilst they hammer them.

Just want to add here that this strategy is done since a long while because of the coinchoose followers. It is not particular to the most recent multipools. I even did it myself with as little as 9MH/s on a coin.

Some difference particular to multipools are:

(1) Multipools seems to converge the users toward a single pool. In contrast, the coinchoose followers are more spread.

(2) Multipools have to do short term automatic dumping. The dump from the coinchoose followers is obviously less systematic... it was not damaging as much the market (as far as I know).

Two differences causing two different issues.

Anyone else want to propose solutions? Go wild with suggestions, this thread is still just brainstorming.

[CoinBuzz]

Anyone else want to propose solutions? Go wild with suggestions, this thread is still just brainstorming.

Since we have many coins that have faster difficulty change than bitcoin, but we don't have any coin has slower difficulty change rate,

My Solution:

What if a coin does not change it's difficulty rapidly, maybe every 24 hours.
Is that going to help?

In this way, when the multipool attack the coin, the block finding chance remains constant and every one have equal chance to find a block proportional to their hash rate.

One downside i can say is that, this coin could be more vulnerable to attacks, since difficulty is not adapt to computing environment around it.

[coinerd]

Anyone else want to propose solutions? Go wild with suggestions, this thread is still just brainstorming.

Since we have many coins that have faster difficulty change than bitcoin, but we don't have any coin has slower difficulty change rate,

My Solution:

What if a coin does not change it's difficulty rapidly, maybe every 24 hours.
Is that going to help?

In this way, when the multipool attack the coin, the block finding chance remains constant and every one have equal chance to find a block proportional to their hash rate.

One downside i can say is that, this coin could be more vulnerable to attacks, since difficulty is not adapt to computing environment around it.

So far the better solution is faster diff adjustment, so the diff ramps up and the hoppers get off the coin faster, leaving the actual supporters time to catch more leftovers while it curves down until the rapists arrive again.

I can completely understand the motives behind these pools, but I can't believe anyone has the balls to call it a good thing.  It's 100% pure profiteering with no concern for even the medium term. 

Long term there's some valid argument that it's an "evolutionary force" but really what that means is things are getting screwed so bad it's forcing change.  The problem is that the change it's forcing is not desirable.  All coins are being forced to respond along identical lines - which will leave them all identically vulnerable when short-term profiteers sort out the next exploit.

Short term solution: lie to them. Coin Choose depends on third parties to report stats about the coins...

[markm]

Hey yeah nice idea, have the getmininginfo and getinfo etc commands adjust what they pretend the difficulty to be based on whether the daemon thinks there are too many miners jumping on the coin at that moment or not enough miners jumping in it at that moment...

-MarkM-

[flound1129]

Anyone else want to propose solutions? Go wild with suggestions, this thread is still just brainstorming.

Since we have many coins that have faster difficulty change than bitcoin, but we don't have any coin has slower difficulty change rate,

My Solution:

What if a coin does not change it's difficulty rapidly, maybe every 24 hours.
Is that going to help?

In this way, when the multipool attack the coin, the block finding chance remains constant and every one have equal chance to find a block proportional to their hash rate.

One downside i can say is that, this coin could be more vulnerable to attacks, since difficulty is not adapt to computing environment around it.

So far the better solution is faster diff adjustment, so the diff ramps up and the hoppers get off the coin faster, leaving the actual supporters time to catch more leftovers while it curves down until the rapists arrive again.

I can completely understand the motives behind these pools, but I can't believe anyone has the balls to call it a good thing.  It's 100% pure profiteering with no concern for even the medium term. 

Long term there's some valid argument that it's an "evolutionary force" but really what that means is things are getting screwed so bad it's forcing change.  The problem is that the change it's forcing is not desirable.  All coins are being forced to respond along identical lines - which will leave them all identically vulnerable when short-term profiteers sort out the next exploit.

Short term solution: lie to them. Coin Choose depends on third parties to report stats about the coins...

I'd say Bottlecaps and Megacoin got the diff adjustment close to perfect.

Mincoin is good too.

[sal002]

That's what happened with DGC, it had great beginnings and slowly grew with a loyal community behind it. An intelligent speculator sees this and decides to invest 5 btc in it, buying up all the sell orders, and then next thing you know it's #1 on coinchoose for all of two hours and the chain gets raped by multipool and profit hoppers who's combined hashpower is double the original. It's like watching a bunch of retarded chickens scurrying around for scattered BTC feed.

I am a little curious on this.  All sell orders where bought up - so presumably the buy orders remain (which are the orders coinchoose looks at) - how did this impact the profitability rating besides some psychological upward price movement on the buy side as well?

[sal002]

Short term solution: lie to them. Coin Choose depends on third parties to report stats about the coins...

Or so you think

[flound1129]

That's what happened with DGC, it had great beginnings and slowly grew with a loyal community behind it. An intelligent speculator sees this and decides to invest 5 btc in it, buying up all the sell orders, and then next thing you know it's #1 on coinchoose for all of two hours and the chain gets raped by multipool and profit hoppers who's combined hashpower is double the original. It's like watching a bunch of retarded chickens scurrying around for scattered BTC feed.

I am a little curious on this.  All sell orders where bought up - so presumably the buy orders remain (which are the orders coinchoose looks at) - how did this impact the profitability rating besides some psychological upward price movement on the buy side as well?

He misunderstands how profit hopping pools work.  In general, the price is less volatile than the difficulty.  The reason profit hopping pools move to coins is usually a difficulty adjustment. (It's possible to switch on price gain alone, but normally the coin in question has to be pretty close to the most profitable to begin with.)  In fact, profit hopping is a misnomer because it implies a reliance on the exchange price.  It should really be called difficulty hopping.

[Sikon024]

Its the same reason Locusts move to a new field. Easier pickings.

[pyra-proxy]

I understand why people mine at Multipool or Middlecoin. I did a bit of "poolhopping" myself when it was hot, I liked the profit too, nothing wrong with that.
The pools fixed it by adding PPLNS and pool hopping was history.

Now we have "profit switching" pools.

Tonight CAPS got forked when (probably) one of the large "switching pools" dropped >600Mhs/s at it.
This will happen to more coins, no doubt. The pool with the largest hashrate can always cause a fork.

I'm not asking you to stop mining at these pools.

I'm asking to think of techniques / strategies to make it less lucrative to mine at these pools.

Some of you may get angry at me for doing this, understand that I only want to protect the supporting miners and the coins they support.
The real coin supporters only get to mine at high difficulty, at low difficulty blocks get eaten up by the coinhoppers, pushing the coin back to a high diff again fast.

This is not a CAPS vs UNOCS vs MEC vd DGC thing.
This can and will hit every coin, sooner or later.
We need to unite!

How do you think we can prevent this from happening again?

ps. Please be nice to each other

merge mine ... the ultimate unity in numbers....

[flound1129]

mo' money, mo' problems

[stink]

I would think you could crank up the Minted block confirmations to combat this.. Looking at a coin with re-target diff of 90 and 6 confirms on minted blocks. On this example:

Could we simply make newly minted coins have a confirmation time of greater than 90 confirmations (ie 120) so they have to keep mining to get paid out?
I would think this option would be very easy to implement
I think this would deter them because if they spike the dif... and leave then they have wait days to get paid out... thus they will give up pointing @ the coin because it would frustrate them for many reasons:
1. they are not patient
2. They dont care about the coins profitability in X days.. they only care about now...
3. It would be another thing to calculate current profitability, thus coinchoose would be incorrect..

Setting up the minting to a high number would not impact investors, as they know they will get thier coins....and will  continue to mine..

 To the multipools they might mine and leave sticking the diff up high, but if they had to wait 1 day to 1 week when the price might have decreased it would not be as attractive to them...

[erk]

Fix the code in the coins so they wont accept blocks faster than a predetermined minimum frequency, and use Internet timestamps not peer consensus time.

 

[turnin]

i am pissed off if  if the wrong cap chain goes on. will loose much money.

Could also wake up one morning, and find BTC to be worth $1.00 each. Crypto is a risky business, get over it

bro if that does happen, please don't wake me

[bitpop]

People who invent these coins are responsible for protecting them period. If its not a pump and dump, then they better be buying $20k of gpus and mining.