[ANN/FullDisc.] Mainframe & Vladimir join forces - Offer Pool Service

[AnnihilaT]

[Announce/Full Disclosure] MMC Charity Pool & Vladimir join forces to  promote new Mining Pool & finance further development of Bitcoin  Software

[Community Press Release]

In the interest of transparency and full disclosure, Mainframe Mining  Cooperative (mining.mainframe.nl) would like to announce that we have  reached a formal agreement with Marchenko Ltd (Vladimir) to form a joint  venture which will include, among other things, co-ownership, co-administration and joint operation of the MMC mining pool.   Under this venture, both parties will be jointly focused on bringing a quality  service to the community and further diversification, redundancy, & computational capacity to the Bitcoin Network.   Additionally, and perhaps more importantly,  this service will be donating a portion  of  every generated block to the developers and writers of open source bitcoin software & literature.  Our intention is to provide benefit to the network, the miners, and the developers who make it all possible and facilitate further development of Bitcoin infrastructure.

We understand that there are unique challenges to bootstrapping a mining pool service  one of the largest being Variance.   It’s the old “chicken & egg” problem.  Under this venture, to help mitigate this  problem and attract users and growth to the pool,  we will be  providing a sustained 30 – 100Ghps of our own hashing power to the  pool to help get the ball rolling and reduce variance for those of you  who want to come and join us. There are further perks and bonus’s  being offered for Early Adopters who join the pool which you can read more about in the official Mainframe forum thread here:

https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=24650.0

We would also like to be completely open and honest about the fact that while we are a Charity Pool,  we are not 100% non-profit.  We do take a 0.5% administration fee from each generated block to help us cover expenses and infrastructure costs and to help cover the time and effort we invest to be able to offer top notch reliability and efficiency.

Best Regards,
The Mainframe Mining Cooperative

[1715241094]

1715241094

[1715241094]

1715241094

[1715241094]

1715241094

[1715241094]

1715241094

[grid]

That is splendid news! Let the word spread!

[forexmasterja]

I'm on board.

[AnnihilaT]

I'm on board.

Excellent!  Welcome!

[Vladimir]

We have recently found our first block which is the first milestone. More to come...

My thanks to everyone who supported us while we are still young and small ( just slightly above 62 Ghps so far ).

[AnnihilaT]

Update:   We just found our 2nd block! 

I Would also like to thank everyone for their support during that first difficult round.  We holding steady at around 65 GH/s at the moment.

Cheers!

[AnnihilaT]

Just a small update to this original post.  We've solved 23 blocks to date and going strong with average of around 2 blocks per day lately.   Check us out if you are looking for a quality small to mid-sized pool to support.   

Cheers!

[bbit]

Just a small update to this original post.  We've solved 23 blocks to date and going strong with average of around 2 blocks per day lately.   Check us out if you are looking for a quality small to mid-sized pool to support.   

Cheers!

Very good news!

[AnnihilaT]

Just a small update to this original post.  We've solved 23 blocks to date and going strong with average of around 2 blocks per day lately.   Check us out if you are looking for a quality small to mid-sized pool to support.   

Cheers!

Very good news!

Yes we are very happy with how things are going so far.   Another 30 GH/s or so and we will be pushing into the top 10!  

Our sincerest thanks to everyone who has gotten involved and helped to get us this far.  Diversity and a good assortment of pools to choose from is good for bitcoin!

[AnnihilaT]

Hey Miners!

We've launched a new design which is prettier to look at and adds some new features and will allow for some very spiffy new in-depth stats and graphs which are being worked on as well right now. 

If you havent checked us out in a while come have another look!  We are running somewhere around +40% luck to date and are finding more blocks than we actually should (statistically) for a pool our size.   Also the donation and charity features of this pool have been made completely optional so our mandatory fees have been reduced by 1% !!!

Come give us another look! 

Cheers,
AnnihilaT

[Vladimir]

Yep, Lady Luck and Mr. Variance were rather very nice to us lately. Those who pushed decent hashes like myself are very very well rewarded for that.

I also would add that we've won a few block races i.e. we solved blocks even when at times other valid solutions were submitted a few seconds before we got a solution of our own. We did not have a single invalid block. Downtime was minimal and pool efficiency is outstanding. I am a very happy chappy here, you could be too.  

[cyberlync]

I agree, this pool is very nice. Can't whine about the luck we had, but must admit, the first round we had, I was kinda thinking; Dang it.. why the heck do I always have to chase the "greener grass".
Now? I'm only sad about not having more cash to get more gpu's, looking at Vladimirs and couple of other pool members hash rates... daily, I get sooo jelly

[TraderTimm]

Just curious, as this applies to the larger pools - do you have failover strategies in place to deal with DDoS attacks? As GigaHash capacity pools consolidate hashing power, you inevitably become a bigger target.

I don't have anything against your enterprise, just seems like a concern you'll have to deal with eventually.

[AnnihilaT]

Just curious, as this applies to the larger pools - do you have failover strategies in place to deal with DDoS attacks? As GigaHash capacity pools consolidate hashing power, you inevitably become a bigger target.

I don't have anything against your enterprise, just seems like a concern you'll have to deal with eventually.

Hi!

Thanks for your intrest!

This is a concern we took into account from the beginning and indeed we have several strategies in place to deal with various types of ddos but im going to be a bit cagey answering your question for a couple reasons.

1) Im originally a network engineer by trade and have dealt with large scale ddos attacks before.
2) By disclosing too much about our strategies i possibly make our strategies less effective.
3) By saying something along the lines of "we are ddos proof" or "we cannot be taken down" you simply reveal your ignorance about how certain types of ddos work and why and how they cause a denial of service.  You also possibly make yourself a target where perhaps previously you would not have been before you opened your mouth and started saying silly things.  

I wont use this as an opportunity to school anyone about distributed denial of service attacks as there is much material to be read about this on the net already and i cant hope to cover it in a short post but its important to mention that certain types of ddos cannot be protected against at all (bandwidth based attacks with the sum of the attackers bandwidth exceeding that of your own backbone uplinks).  Given enough attacking client machines ("huge dosnet with MANY zombies") ANYTHING can be taken down.  For very large attacks of this type which exceed your own uplink bandwidth there are few options.  However there is planning and preparation that can be done in advance to cope with events like this.

What i will say is this.  We will never claim to be ddos proof as anyone with sufficient resources and intelligence can take anything down - but - much can be said for the network which is prepared, knowledgeable, and has failover plans in place.  These are the things we have in our advantage.  

We are also multi-homed & redundantly uplinked (3 x 1000Mb uplinks) with multiple physical locations, control our own network & backbone routers, and have several large IPv4 & IPv6 block assignments.  (This pool is a hobby project... We actually own and operate an ISP as our mainline business).

So, yes. We have strategies in place.  Are they effective?  Only time can tell.  We have to date been attacked once already which registered an additional 850Mb (megabit) of traffic on our upstream routers.  This had no effect on us other than making some pretty spikes in our network utilization graphs BUT that is only one of several types of attacks that could be launched.  

Cheers,
Anni

[cyberlync]

wow, if it hadn't been for the post above, I would never have known about the attack, props to you admins. 

[AnnihilaT]

wow, if it hadn't been for the post above, I would never have known about the attack, props to you admins. 

thanks!

[TraderTimm]

AnnihilaT,
            I understand your reluctance to name specific strategies, but you've completely answered my question. Seems you have the ducks in a row, good to see.

[AnnihilaT]

Mainframe Mining Cooperative OFFICIAL NOTICE:

After careful monitoring of our current situation, we have determined that the erosion of income from our loyal miners has no longer become merely negligible due to pool hopping.  In order to head this off before it becomes a problem and discourages loyal miners from using this pool we have taken the following immediate action.

10 minutes ago after our last block payout,  I implemented a PPLNS reward system in this pool.   From this point forward, Mainframe is no longer a "pool hopper friendly" pool.

Let this serve as official notice to all pool hoppers - Mainframe will not help you cheat our loyal users out of hard earned BTC.

Cheers!
AnnihilaT, Vladimir, and the rest of the Mainframe Staff.