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

[Krak]

Hi,

    Google is a great DNS provider. 8.8.8.8, and 8.8.4.4 are the two IPs that I am familiar with for Google's DNS servers.

Or you can go IPv6 for all of your DNS requests with 2001:4860:4860::8888 and 2001:4860:4860::8844.

[philipma1957]

Do you think that "bad hardware / software" exists and that could make the pool vulnerable?  

Like I said, all mining pools are vulnerable to block withholding attacks. All pools.

Whether bad software is still out there, I don't know. But as we have seen, it can happen.

Bad hardware is very unlikely. All the ASICs I heard of so far simply look for anything from diff 1 and up. Doing something else would require more logic on the chip.

Okay, I concur all pools are vulnerable to block withholding attacks (currently) .. and established bad software exists, and we can debate hardware concerns pointlessly as a "consumer union" report would have to test different hardware with testcases.
 
So, given that vulnerabilities exist, do you think it is possible and worth protecting against known vulnerabilities?

Is there a statistical test to say that a miner or group of miners are behaving unusually ... I would think there is.

yes  there are tests,    but  all involve   groups of about 100th to 200th of hash.

  In bitminter :

 group  1        total of  200th
koi ....

Philipma... i agree with you, mostly because I proposed group statistical evaluation and probation.

Do i care if a small miner benefits from bad hardware/software?  In theory, yes, but how does one practically identify and enforce?

Well, one idea is go back to grouping the miners together, and paying out proportional to their contribution if it is outside an acceptable statistical mean.  You could manage it on a rolling "find" basis. So, for example, if a 200 Th group should find 9 blocks (on average) over a one month period, with a deviation of +/- 1 block, but your group finds 6, that would be statistically abnormal... so the group payout would be less. Likewise, if a 200 Th group finds 12 blocks, you could argue they should get more.

Over time, in the law of averages, it should even out.  But if a group is consistently underperforming, then you know you have bad actors (intentionally or not).

It is a completely different way of operating a pool. So, Dr. H needs to buy into this idea and determine whether it is worth his time. 

After really looking at a few ideas.

 It pushes me in the direction of using gridseed gear and mining alt coins.

 Only because diff is small enough to justify solo mining.

 I have made  a few blocks with gridseed blades and I know the gear and software is working. 

Not what I want to do.  For now I split up between ltc and btc and use a few pools.  lowers risks a bit.

   

    I don't even want to go into the idea that a big seller of gear sells 20ph of duds and keeps 20ph of good gear intentionally.

 As I could see it as a way to hurt  pools and help yourself at solo mining.   

   While the bigger sellers may not do  this  thinking they would be found out.

The fact is right now pools have zero protection against it.

So how about bitmaintech is asked by Chinese government to do this or else?

 MIND you  all no accusations or conspiracy   just a how about it is done? 

We all know btc miners are creaming over the idea of the s-3 miner.   If the price was .75 btc to .8btc it would sell like mad.   I believe this type of attack won't be

 done  since many wizz kids will look at the gear closely. 

But  pools need to do something about this threat.

 Since it does exist and has been done to 2 pools by the unknown 2ph miner…..

     I am not saying it was done to bitminter by multipool   with his 200th of hash.

 He had a case of bad timing to come to a pool with a little more then 15% of the total hash and he  had semi bad luck.  And since April and May had two cases We were afraid to be a third case here in June.  From all the posts I have read.

The odds for April and May were more then 100000 to one  while for multi pool the odds were under 20 to one.

 Big difference , but still costly if it was intentional.

[sahana]

You can get the IP using http://www.whatismyip.com/

There is a similar ip search site called IP-Details.com to check our External ip address. Here it display IP address, ISP, Location, Country and so on,...

[AaronS]

What is wrong with putting a CDF beside all of the top 50?   And maybe another column showing their longer term luck?
Is that too complicated?    We need to police this some way that all find agreeable.

One problem would be that for a user near the bottom of the top 50 we're looking at about 6 months per block at current difficulty, so CDF wouldn't be very meaningful over time frames we're interested in.  A second problem is that with 50 CDFs listed we should expect to have one over 98% (1 in 50) at all times so we're just setting up for a witch hunt.

[14er]

    I don't even want to go into the idea that a big seller of gear sells 20ph of duds and keeps 20ph of good gear intentionally.

 As I could see it as a way to hurt  pools and help yourself at solo mining.   

   While the bigger sellers may not do  this  thinking they would be found out.

The fact is right now pools have zero protection against it.

As difficulty rises, it makes it harder for the small guy to find out if his hardware is dud, especially if they participate in pools.

Given the douchery of almost EVERY mining hardware manufacturer out there, I would not be surprised if garbage is being sold.  The only people who can truly test the HW are the manufacturers.  When you manufacture silicon and assemble the chips, you have test programs that allow you to test the circuit.

You would have to be an idiot manufacturer to not test the goods.  You know which chips are stable / good, and which are bad. 

ONCE you seal up the device for sale, you put a "warranty void" sticker on it, but that prevents many hobbyists from opening it up and testing themselves (if they know the pin sequence and codes), so they operate on faith that it is good hardware.


In a completely random universe, the pools should be receiving coin proportional to their hashrate.  I have never bothered to check the math... but it shouldn't be hard to do.

[AaronS]

yes  there are tests,    but  all involve   groups of about 100th to 200th of hash.

  In bitminter :

 group  1        total of  200th
koi ....

Philipma... i agree with you, mostly because I proposed group statistical evaluation and probation.

Do i care if a small miner benefits from bad hardware/software?  In theory, yes, but how does one practically identify and enforce?

Well, one idea is go back to grouping the miners together, and paying out proportional to their contribution if it is outside an acceptable statistical mean.  You could manage it on a rolling "find" basis. So, for example, if a 200 Th group should find 9 blocks (on average) over a one month period, with a deviation of +/- 1 block, but your group finds 6, that would be statistically abnormal... so the group payout would be less. Likewise, if a 200 Th group finds 12 blocks, you could argue they should get more.

Over time, in the law of averages, it should even out.  But if a group is consistently underperforming, then you know you have bad actors (intentionally or not).

It is a completely different way of operating a pool. So, Dr. H needs to buy into this idea and determine whether it is worth his time. 

First off, finding 6 instead of 9 blocks would not be statistically abnormal for any reasonable definition of abnormal.  Second, what is being suggested is making everyone mine in a pool that is only 200 Th/s.  If people wanted to be in pools that small they would join pools that small.  GHash is so popular exactly because people do not want to be in overly small pools.

Yes, over time things would average out, but you could say exactly the same thing about solo mining.  In fact, over time you will make more solo mining than pool mining because you don't have to pay the pool fees.   So why isn't everyone solo mining? Because we want lower variance than we get solo mining.  No one would join a pool with enforced 200 Th/s sub-pools.

As to Philip's idea, if you group users together for statistical analysis you pretty much eliminate any chance of finding a bad actor since the poor results are covered up by everyone else in the group, just as a pool covers it up in general.  Checking users individually clearly makes no sense except for the biggest few.  Even if you could check all the users, with over 6000 workers in the pool we should expect more than 6 workers with CDF of 99.9% or worse.  So how would you define unlucky then?  It is a distribution and you cannot just cut the tail off.  If you eliminate the most unlucky users from your pool there will be new "most unlucky" users.  As someone mentioned earlier, this strategy will result in a pool of just a single user - and even this super lucky user will, given time (of say about 100 blocks found) will also have had a CDF over 99%.

[philipma1957]

which brings us back to if we can't detect it what would deter someone from trying it.  

   Well how about this   if your have a worker under 850gh  we don't ask you to solo mine  from 0000 to 0100 each day it is optional.

 If you are over 850gh you solo mine from 0000 to 0100 each day.


   Since the bigger a bad gear worker is the more he hurts us .

  Screening over 850gh for an hour a day via solo mining  only deters  people with bad gear/software.

So a 200th guy  down to a 850gh guy  with bad gear/software has  a penalty of 1/24 each day since he won't ever hit during solo time.

Thus if someone knows his gear sucks he would say I don't want to pay 4% extra to mine here.
Little guys don't have to deal with the problem. Since they get skipped over.

Just make 2 pool connections one for over and one for under 850gh.

Also allow the lower then 850gh to go in the over 850gh if they feel 'lucky'  but don't allow the over 850 gh guy to go in the lower part pf the pool.

this at least makes an extra penalty to a terrible big miner.  In the case of multipool    the extra 75 coins he grabbed would have been reduced by 1/24.

 Not an ideal fix but it does help even things out.
  

[Red Star Mining]

which brings us back to if we can't detect it what would deter someone from trying it.  

   Well how about this   if your have a worker under 850gh  we don't ask you to solo mine  from 0000 to 0100 each day it is optional.

 If you are over 850gh you solo mine from 0000 to 0100 each day.


   Since the bigger a bad gear worker is the more he hurts us .

  Screening over 850gh for an hour a day via solo mining  only deters  people with bad gear/software.

So a 200th guy  down to a 850gh guy  with bad gear/software has  a penalty of 1/24 each day since he won't ever hit during solo time.

Thus if someone knows his gear sucks he would say I don't want to pay 4% extra to mine here.
Little guys don't have to deal with the problem. Since they get skipped over.

Just make 2 pool connections one for over and one for under 850gh.

Also allow the lower then 850gh to go in the over 850gh if they feel 'lucky'  but don't allow the over 850 gh guy to go in the lower part pf the pool.

this at least makes an extra penalty to a terrible big miner.  In the case of multipool    the extra 75 coins he grabbed would have been reduced by 1/24.

 Not an ideal fix but it does help even things out.
  

This pool has already had enough bad luck since we pointed some hashrate here a week ago.  If we had to solo-mine even for just one hour a day we'd leave and I think a lot of others would too.  As so far deciding to use this pool looks like its cost us unless the pool gets a run of lucky blocks before the next difficulty change.  Wasn't Eligius recently attacked by bad miners and lost over 400BTC?  

[philipma1957]

which brings us back to if we can't detect it what would deter someone from trying it.  

   Well how about this   if your have a worker under 850gh  we don't ask you to solo mine  from 0000 to 0100 each day it is optional.

 If you are over 850gh you solo mine from 0000 to 0100 each day.


   Since the bigger a bad gear worker is the more he hurts us .

  Screening over 850gh for an hour a day via solo mining  only deters  people with bad gear/software.

So a 200th guy  down to a 850gh guy  with bad gear/software has  a penalty of 1/24 each day since he won't ever hit during solo time.

Thus if someone knows his gear sucks he would say I don't want to pay 4% extra to mine here.
Little guys don't have to deal with the problem. Since they get skipped over.

Just make 2 pool connections one for over and one for under 850gh.

Also allow the lower then 850gh to go in the over 850gh if they feel 'lucky'  but don't allow the over 850 gh guy to go in the lower part pf the pool.

this at least makes an extra penalty to a terrible big miner.  In the case of multipool    the extra 75 coins he grabbed would have been reduced by 1/24.

 Not an ideal fix but it does help even things out.
  

This pool has already had enough bad luck since we pointed some hashrate here a week ago.  If we had to solo-mine even for just one hour a day we'd leave and i think a lot of others would too.  As so far deciding to use this pool looks like its cost us unless the pool gets a run of lucky blocks before the next difficulty change.  Wasn't Eligius recently attacked by bad miners and lost over 400BTC?  

    both Eligius and BTCGuild suffered attacks  = pretty much confirmed as truth  200btc + 400btc lost


  Plus someone claimed that cex.io was attacked deliberately and that resulted in a 4% loss.  the attacker said they did this to lower cex.io's share under the dreaded 51%.  Truth or rumor I do not know.

One good thing  this means is BTC has attracted  enough attention for heavy duty players both good and bad . 

The bad thing is these bad luck attacks have happened and are pretty much real.

[14er]

First off, finding 6 instead of 9 blocks would not be statistically abnormal for any reasonable definition of abnormal.  Second, what is being suggested is making everyone mine in a pool that is only 200 Th/s.  If people wanted to be in pools that small they would join pools that small.  GHash is so popular exactly because people do not want to be in overly small pools.

Yes, over time things would average out, but you could say exactly the same thing about solo mining.  In fact, over time you will make more solo mining than pool mining because you don't have to pay the pool fees.   So why isn't everyone solo mining? Because we want lower variance than we get solo mining.  No one would join a pool with enforced 200 Th/s sub-pools.

The definition of acceptable variance can be debated (wider window, longer time), but there's currently no mechanism to determine if some people or group of people are behaving badly.  The notion of subgrouping helps identify the bad actors.  If your "group" consistently performs below statistical expectation, then something's not right.

You could keep the payout as is, but simply start tracking groups of people for non-normal behavior... right now, everything is monitored on a total pool basis.

The question stands... how do you know if you're being attacked at a level that is not statistically acceptable (cost of business, assume some crooks always exist).

[jfederkins]

While I claim to be completely ignorant about the inter workings of BitCoin, I have been in software development for 35 years. With all of this discussion about "bad actors", isn't there a way a pool operator can test a miner's hardware/software by sending a "test" packet with a known result? The miner wouldn't know when a test could take place, the pool operator could send one whenever he/she wanted. This would be along the lines of a random "drug test" used by sport teams. The pool operator could use this type of test to identify potential "bad actors" and track how many tests fail over a given period of time or number of tests. I know that miners with multiple hardware miners can mine under a single miner name, the pool operator can send a number of tests in proportion to the hashing power of the miner. While this isn't 100% fool proof, I think it would be a good starting point. If a pool operator advertises that this type of testing takes place on the pool, it might be enough to scare away the "bad actors", just like putting a sign in front of a house stating that the house is protected by an alarm.

Just my 2 cents....

[14er]

While I claim to be completely ignorant about the inter workings of BitCoin, I have been in software development for 35 years. With all of this discussion about "bad actors", isn't there a way a pool operator can test a miner's hardware/software by sending a "test" packet with a known result? The miner wouldn't know when a test could take place, the pool operator could send one whenever he/she wanted. This would be along the lines of a random "drug test" used by sport teams. The pool operator could use this type of test to identify potential "bad actors" and track how many tests fail over a given period of time or number of tests. I know that miners with multiple hardware miners can mine under a single miner name, the pool operator can send a number of tests in proportion to the hashing power of the miner. While this isn't 100% fool proof, I think it would be a good starting point. If a pool operator advertises that this type of testing takes place on the pool, it might be enough to scare away the "bad actors", just like putting a sign in front of a house stating that the house is protected by an alarm.

Just my 2 cents....

This concept has also been proposed / discussed... and I totally agree, but apparently you do need to modify some software, and it shouldn't be a one-time thing, but a periodic check (like drug testing).

[philipma1957]

While I claim to be completely ignorant about the inter workings of BitCoin, I have been in software development for 35 years. With all of this discussion about "bad actors", isn't there a way a pool operator can test a miner's hardware/software by sending a "test" packet with a known result? The miner wouldn't know when a test could take place, the pool operator could send one whenever he/she wanted. This would be along the lines of a random "drug test" used by sport teams. The pool operator could use this type of test to identify potential "bad actors" and track how many tests fail over a given period of time or number of tests. I know that miners with multiple hardware miners can mine under a single miner name, the pool operator can send a number of tests in proportion to the hashing power of the miner. While this isn't 100% fool proof, I think it would be a good starting point. If a pool operator advertises that this type of testing takes place on the pool, it might be enough to scare away the "bad actors", just like putting a sign in front of a house stating that the house is protected by an alarm.

Just my 2 cents....

This concept has also been proposed / discussed... and I totally agree, but apparently you do need to modify some software, and it shouldn't be a one-time thing, but a periodic check (like drug testing).

well hopefully it gets past the talking stages.  As a 5-10k in gear in-house max and a 4k-5k watt max miner.  for me I can only spread stuff out between pools.

  I may go more towards grid seed blades since soloing mining script coins is easier the do ing btc.

 I estimate that I can solo mine ltc and get 1 block a week in-house  [edit ] if I jump my  blades up to  16 of them. .  

There is no way I can ever do this with btc.

  I would need 20 sp30's  and that is 40k watts with 120th hash power.

cost maybe a discount and 80k not 100k .

while 16 gridseed blades= 8k  hash at 80mh  pull 1300 watts make a block of ltc in about 1 week

[oskuro]

Hi.

I would like to know which pool do you recommend:

Bitminter or Slush Pool(bitcoin.cz) ??

Just because i didnt try minining on bitminter, just to know.

thanks

[DevonMiner]

Hi.

I would like to know which pool do you recommend:

Bitminter or Slush Pool(bitcoin.cz) ??

Just because i didnt try minining on bitminter, just to know.

thanks

Err... this is the Bitminter thread ... so I'm guessing a lot of folk (like me) are Bitminters ... Many have mined on and off various pools ... the truth is you 'should' earn the same from each .... once variance averages out - but only you can make that call after having mined on them and you get to make a decision.

[oskuro]

Hi.

I would like to know which pool do you recommend:

Bitminter or Slush Pool(bitcoin.cz) ??

Just because i didnt try minining on bitminter, just to know.

thanks

Err... this is the Bitminter thread ... so I'm guessing a lot of folk (like me) are Bitminters ... Many have mined on and off various pools ... the truth is you 'should' earn the same from each .... once variance averages out - but only you can make that call after having mined on them and you get to make a decision.

yeah thats why i ask, because im sure many here have mined on both, just to know what pple prefer. Ok i will mine then and decide. thx

[jfederkins]

Hi.

I would like to know which pool do you recommend:

Bitminter or Slush Pool(bitcoin.cz) ??

Just because i didnt try minining on bitminter, just to know.

thanks

BitMinter is the only place I mine for BTCs.

You can't go wrong with the good Doctor H.   

[oskuro]

Hi.

I would like to know which pool do you recommend:

Bitminter or Slush Pool(bitcoin.cz) ??

Just because i didnt try minining on bitminter, just to know.

thanks

BitMinter is the only place I mine for BTCs.

You can't go wrong with the good Doctor H.  

but there are no "live stats" like in bitcoin.cz for example? how do i know the % left for finding next block, how much i earn for a block found, and so on?

edit: Ok sorry, found it. well mining right now, lets see how this pool works

[SgtMoth]

anybody else having problems with their miners switching to backup pools?

[Newar]

anybody else having problems with their miners switching to backup pools?

Worked fine for me during the last one (a few days ago?) with cgminer 3.4.3. Which mining software are you using?