[1050 TH] BitMinter.com [1% PPLNS,Pays TxFees +MergedMining,Stratum,GBT,vardiff]

[Rishodi]

Luck is a factor for days, or even weeks.  I am talking about months of below expected results.

And luck is bi-directional.  Except for Bitminter where the payout graph hasn't gone over the expect line for more than a year.

Where are you getting that information? The payout graph that I see, on Bitminter's rewards page, only shows the last few weeks, although that is not clear as the scale of the horizontal axis is not labeled.

Perhaps an analysis should be done on whether any high hash users are finding no blocks for the pool or perhaps far fewer blocks than is statistically likely.

With access to the pool's DB, that sort of analysis would be easy to do and would quickly identify any power users who had submitted a large number of shares but not found any blocks. However, if this type of withholding attack were indeed occurring, such analysis would easily miss a distributed attack of the same sort.

For example, if a user with 500GH/s has been mining for months, has submitted hundreds of millions of shares, and has yet found no blocks, that might be suspicious. But if 500 users with 1GH/s each had been mining for the same period of time and collectively submitted the same number of shares, it is entirely likely, on a per-user basis, that each of them would not have found a block. Thus if there were a large number of users participating in such an attack, at lower hashing speeds it would be essentially impossible to distinguish the miners who were participating in it from those who were not.

That being said, since there is no profit motive in such an attack -- worse, it's actually detrimental for any pool user to withhold a block hash which meets the target difficulty -- I think that such an attack is rather unlikely. The motive would perhaps be personal or spiteful in nature, and it would likely not be sustained for long due to opposing financial motivations.

[kano]

Speculations on the motive of such an attack, only destruction if no personal profit possible?

With PPS, the loss for the miner is only 1 share each time he finds a block ...
Thus on PPS it will directly affect the pool op but the miners are not affected at all and the witholder is losing only 1 in "network difficulty"/"work difficulty" shares ...
i.e. 10million/"work difficulty" (so mining at 10 diff the miner loses 0.0001% ...)

[organofcorti]

[...]
I DO NOT suspect malfeasance on the operator's part at all - if Dr. Haribo was cheating, why not keep NMC payouts all to himself?  (I wouldn't be surprised to find that some pools are merged mining and keeping the alt-chain coins)

I suspect there is either a significant bug in the pool, or someone has worked out a method to exploit the payout mechanism similar to the hopping strategy.  Or it could be as simple as a bad calculation in the expected vs. actual payouts graph.

To work out what is going on would require detailed analysis of data that only the pool has access to.  [....]

No, you're assuming too much there. All the charts you are looking at are based on publicly available data, so the answer is in the data.

It's non-trivial but quite possible to analyse that data and determine 1. if the data is extremely unusual, and 2. hypothesize about reasons for any data anomaly. I've done exactly that here:

http://organofcorti.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/81-bitcoinpool-another-bitclockers.html
http://organofcorti.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/82-bitcoinpool-great-anomaly-hunt.html

Without analysing data you're flying in the dark and just guessing at problems without knowing if there are any significant problems, or what the nature of the problems are.

If you do wish to put your money where your mouth is, the offer holds

[PCMiner]

Someone with access to several ASIC's is onboard now, cranking 1.5+THps?  That's insane.  I'll leave my token Nvidia machines on BTC, but the end is near for all GPU BTC mining.  Time for me to switch most everything over to LTC.

[Newar]

Someone with access to several ASIC's is onboard now, cranking 1.5+THps?  That's insane.  I'll leave my token Nvidia machines on BTC, but the end is near for all GPU BTC mining.  Time for me to switch most everything over to LTC.

ASICMINER

Another 1.5T online, temporarily allocated on bitminter. Will switch to solo later on.

[Jcw188]

Someone with access to several ASIC's is onboard now, cranking 1.5+THps?  That's insane.  I'll leave my token Nvidia machines on BTC, but the end is near for all GPU BTC mining.  Time for me to switch most everything over to LTC.

ASICMINER

Another 1.5T online, temporarily allocated on bitminter. Will switch to solo later on.

Ah I was wondering why my expected btc per block found went down substantially. This would explain it right?  Weird though, not like we have been finding many blocks lately :-(

[organofcorti]

Someone with access to several ASIC's is onboard now, cranking 1.5+THps?  That's insane.  I'll leave my token Nvidia machines on BTC, but the end is near for all GPU BTC mining.  Time for me to switch most everything over to LTC.

ASICMINER

Another 1.5T online, temporarily allocated on bitminter. Will switch to solo later on.

Ah I was wondering why my expected btc per block found went down substantially. This would explain it right?  Weird though, not like we have been finding many blocks lately :-(

You get less btc per block and more blocks. btc per shift is unaffected, except that variance is reduced.

[matt4054]

'realasicminer' has just found its first block, let's hope this was just bad luck and things go back to normal.

I like BitMinter (that's why I elected it as primary pool), but I must admit that:

• I had the impression that BitMinter was REALLY unlucky for the past 2 weeks,
• As one user out of thousands, I'm not willing to pay >1BTC on my expenses to find out why some pool would have a problem (and not getting ROI), I think the pool operator should do it on pool fee's expenses, now that the fees are in place (with all due repect the DrHaribo's work),
• Switching pools (and losing the NMC) seems to make more sense for an individual, GPU miner. The end is near anyway.

[GuiltySpark343]

Now with 8+ TH/s we should on avg be finding 16 blocks/day at current difficulty 10076293.

So far today (past 15 hrs) found 4.
Yesterday (during full 24 hr period) found 7.

[Jcw188]

Wow realasicminer is up to 2.5 th/s. hope the pools luck will improve.

So u r saying that I get less btc per block found but it should be finding more blocks so it evens out. Well we will see cuz frankly luck has stunk here lately.

[Jcw188]

'realasicminer' has just found its first block, let's hope this was just bad luck and things go back to normal.

I like BitMinter (that's why I elected it as primary pool), but I must admit that:

• I had the impression that BitMinter was REALLY unlucky for the past 2 weeks,
• As one user out of thousands, I'm not willing to pay >1BTC on my expenses to find out why some pool would have a problem (and not getting ROI), I think the pool operator should do it on pool fee's expenses, now that the fees are in place (with all due repect the DrHaribo's work),
• Switching pools (and losing the NMC) seems to make more sense for an individual, GPU miner. The end is near anyway.

See this is what I was wondering. Is it true I should switch to different pool with 300 mhash/sec? Or will we just find more blocks to make up for less per block

[i3one21]

What do you think "RealAsicMiner" is running?  The whole Bitminter hash rate jumped almost 3 Thps.

[matt4054]

See this is what I was wondering. Is it true I should switch to different pool with 300 mhash/sec? Or will we just find more blocks to make up for less per block

Switching to another PPLNS pool with more or less hashrate should not change anything. If you want security and are willing to pay the fees, you should move to a pure PPS pool. That's why I'm considering, I prefered BitMinter, but I'm curious about the "too unlucky" issue discussed at the moment.

[Newar]

What do you think "RealAsicMiner" is running?  The whole Bitminter hash rate jumped almost 3 Thps.

Here's a good read for ya: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.0

[Pentel]

Well looks like someone got there 1,500 GH/s Bitcoin Miner BitForce Mini Rig SC

Delivered   Cool!

[Newar]

Well looks like someone got there 1,500 GH/s Bitcoin Miner BitForce Mini Rig SC

Delivered   Cool!

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27062.msg2027471#msg2027471

[Pentel]

Cool, anyway.

[DrHaribo]

And luck is bi-directional.  Except for Bitminter where the payout graph hasn't gone over the expect line for more than a year.

Do you mean we have not had one lucky day for a full year? You know that's not true.

The actual is above the expected for part of the graph when I look at it now: http://bitminter.com/stats/rewards
And it has not been 1 year since this could last be seen.

The rewards graph is only the last 500 shifts. Currently, as I write this, it goes back to shift 14399 which was 2013-04-18 20:38 UTC. That's only 16 days. I'll agree the last 5 days or so were bad, but let's not go overboard.

I'll get some more data to show how the luck has been. In the meantime please give the FUD some rest.

[Entropy-uc]

And luck is bi-directional.  Except for Bitminter where the payout graph hasn't gone over the expect line for more than a year.

Do you mean we have not had one lucky day for a full year? You know that's not true.

The actual is above the expected for part of the graph when I look at it now: http://bitminter.com/stats/rewards
And it has not been 1 year since this could last be seen.

The rewards graph is only the last 500 shifts. Currently, as I write this, it goes back to shift 14399 which was 2013-04-18 20:38 UTC. That's only 16 days. I'll agree the last 5 days or so were bad, but let's not go overboard.

I'll get some more data to show how the luck has been. In the meantime please give the FUD some rest.

I said that actual rewards have trended below expected for several months.  That is true.  And it continues to be true.

If everything was kosher, you would expect to see that trend chart having equal areas above, and below the expected reward line.  I have never looked at the chart and seen it ahead at the end of a 500 block period.

It's not FUD to give you fair warning that you are likely being exploited in some fashion.

Graet was robbed for months by miners hopping payout methods and didn't notice until they broke the bank.  You need to be more vigilant.

Edit:  The 500 block shortfall is also remarkably consistent at slightly greater than 10%.  I mined several thousand coins with Bitminter before deciding the pattern was too suspicious to tolerate.  That's the price of a nice car that is missing, and I was only 3% of your pool at my peak.

[Newar]

[...]
The rewards graph is only the last 500 shifts. Currently, as I write this, it goes back to shift 14399 which was 2013-04-18 20:38 UTC. That's only 16 days. [...]

A clearer description of the x-axis would probably be helpful. I.e the actual dates.