[1423GH] ABCPool PPS - Proxy Pool For High & Steady Mining Rewards

[dirtycat]

Anyway they do not mine blocks or have rounds so they can't post this...

related,  ABC pervz, would the control of gigaminer please contact me. If you don't I will just post the data here...

Are you accusing abcpool.co of using others hashing power to pool hop? Do you have evidence of this?

Remember a while back in this thread ?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=33586.msg684977#msg684977
&
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=33586.msg688695#msg688695

Well...confirmed.

I was wondering when someone was going to bring this back up.

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[Eveofwar]

Anyway they do not mine blocks or have rounds so they can't post this...

related,  ABC pervz, would the control of gigaminer please contact me. If you don't I will just post the data here...

Are you accusing abcpool.co of using others hashing power to pool hop? Do you have evidence of this?

Remember a while back in this thread ?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=33586.msg684977#msg684977
&
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=33586.msg688695#msg688695

Well...confirmed.

I was wondering when someone was going to bring this back up.

I was just waiting for the right time, I had you in my back pocket.  No worries kitty

[farfiman]

A while back a friend, that I introduced to bitcoin, asked How do I know that my hashing power
isn't being used to help the Iranians develop a nuclear device or some other evil deed...
I just laughed of course and gave him a short explanation how it works.... well, in light
of the recent event(s) I can't say anymore that it's not possible....



EDIT: just noticed it's my 251st post and I am now Sr.Member.. should have put up some wise words...

[The00Dustin]

A while back a friend, that I introduced to bitcoin, asked How do I know that my hashing power
isn't being used to help the Iranians develop a nuclear device or some other evil deed...
I just laughed of course and gave him a short explanation how it works.... well, in light
of the recent event(s) I can't say anymore that it's not possible....



EDIT: just noticed it's my 251st post and I am now Sr.Member.. should have put up some wise words...

It's still not possible, unless it's helping "the Iranians" by earning/finding them something that you can earn/find be solving sha256 hashes (if that's the right kind of hash, but my point is that the miner on your friend's cpu will only do what it is programmed to do).  The GPU is only doing that, so while the hashing power can be redirected, it's purpose can't be changed into something that requires completely different math/work.

[jamesg]

I agree that it does seem shady for a pool to send it's power off somewhere else without telling it's miners.  If gigavps can verify the information I would be interested in seeing it.

As Goat stated, GPUMAX had nothing to do with this deal and wouldn't condone such an operation.

I would like Giga's thoughts on this and then would like to give ABC a chance to come out and let us know what is going on. If they do not want to clear this up I guess we can post everything we know. Would making public gigaminer's Singular phone account be too much? lol yeah we know who you are:)

I only brought this issue up in the thread to make sure they knew that their hashing power was being redirected, I just wanted to make sure it was not stolen. That is why I have not paid ABC their coins yet, just wanted that confirmation I got via PM recently.

Anyway until this gets sorted, or you post a BTC address in the thread I am going to hold onto the coins...

I did think that it was GPUMAX at first just because damn, 400G but after checking we know it is not GPUMAX.

The information provided looks legitimate. It shows a request for work coming from an amazon ec2 IP address for the worker "gigaminer". It also shows a response with a valid solution to a block.

I am admittedly not an expert in these matters and have been asked to keep the information private. I will let the owners of the information provide it.

[farfiman]

A while back a friend, that I introduced to bitcoin, asked How do I know that my hashing power
isn't being used to help the Iranians develop a nuclear device or some other evil deed...
I just laughed of course and gave him a short explanation how it works.... well, in light
of the recent event(s) I can't say anymore that it's not possible....



EDIT: just noticed it's my 251st post and I am now Sr.Member.. should have put up some wise words...

It's still not possible, unless it's helping "the Iranians" by earning/finding them something that you can earn/find be solving sha256 hashes (if that's the right kind of hash, but my point is that the miner on your friend's cpu will only do what it is programmed to do).  The GPU is only doing that, so while the hashing power can be redirected, it's purpose can't be changed into something that requires completely different math/work.

maybe for hacking passwords then....

[Inaba]

Well, they are technically mining blocks and I don't recall them ever saying they were mining blocks on their own bitcoind. 

Frankly, I'm not sure I see anything wrong with this - it's not like they have a monopoly as a pool and people are free to mine where they choose.  I dunno, I have to give it some more thought... but what are the actual objections to this?

[The00Dustin]

Well, they are technically mining blocks and I don't recall them ever saying they were mining blocks on their own bitcoind. 

Frankly, I'm not sure I see anything wrong with this - it's not like they have a monopoly as a pool and people are free to mine where they choose.  I dunno, I have to give it some more thought... but what are the actual objections to this?

"Pool hoppers is the devil and pool operators that run not-hop-proof pools isn't stupid!"  lol, I don't know how I feel about it either, but you know members on this forum like pitchforks and torches more than reason and sense.  We all like transparency, though, and if ABCPool was charging a fee "for pool costs" and making a separate undisclosed sum by using actually mining on a 105% payout pool, I'd rather be in the 105% pool.  Realistically the 105% pool doesn't want <500MH hashers, though, so the option to merge my power with someone else and get paid the same is nice (other than the 4% fee would then really be a 9% fee in disguise).

[siggy]

And on a completely unrelated note... I see that my invalids have shot up to almost 5% since yesterday..  Any idea what is up with that?

Sigg

[despoiler]

And on a completely unrelated note... I see that my invalids have shot up to almost 5% since yesterday..  Any idea what is up with that?

Sigg

They are implementing load balancing to their servers and it isn't 100% yet. 

[MintCondition]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your patience. While we took care of rolling out the DDOS countermeasures, a lively discussion has been going on in the ABC thread. We think the time has come to explain a few things about how ABCPool works behind the scenes.

Well-respected forum member Meni Rosenfeld ran the numbers on running a PPS pool, and while ABCPool was still young he shared those with us in a PM conversation:

Most people greatly underestimate what the risk of PPS is. You may want to have a look at my discussion of PPS here. If you don't take a fee there is a 100% chance you will go bankrupt eventually. If you take 2% fee and start with a reserve of 500 BTC the chance is 67%, which is very high. And this is without considering losses due to block withholding, stales, invalid blocks etc.

That pdf  [https://bitcoil.co.il/pool_analysis.pdf which Meni introduced earlier]  seems to offer a straightforward way to compute the fee, great!

You could use it that way. Take some reasonable number for delta, such as 1/1000. Then the fee should be
f = (B ln(1/delta))/(2R) = 173/R
so for a 10,000 BTC reserve you should take 1.7% fee.
To this you need to add losses from useless shares - if this loss is 2% you need 3.7% fee.
It's important to realize that running a PPS pool can't be done as a hobby. It's a serious business that needs a very careful risk assessment. The more accurate your loss estimate (and the lower you manage to make these losses) the more successful it will be.

Well, as you might imagine, we did not have 10,000 BTC. Neither did at least three other PPS pools that have since gone out of business or changed their reward model.

But if we could somehow decrease that enormous risk, the required buffer could also be a lot smaller. That’s why we now do what most miners do. They consider solo mining too risky, and aggregate their mining power with the mining power of others by joining a pool. Or in our case, joining several pools.

And as any pool miner has experienced, the result is as expected: less variation in the payouts we receive. In turn we are now able to pay the ABC miners their PPS rewards without a 10,000 BTC buffer, without a 10% fee, and without the immediate loom of pool bankruptcy hanging over us.

Pool growth in December was overwhelming. Meanwhile we were still compensating (1) orphaned blocks and (2) stale shares. And although the risk was reduced by pool mining, we had (3) a lot of bad luck that month. That's when we had to start charging the 4% fee.

We understand that there might be people who want to leave ABCPool, having heard this news. Maybe you want the pool operator to take the full risk of finding blocks. Maybe you'd rather take your chances on a non-PPS pool, now that you know that we do so too. Maybe you feel that we should have disclosed this information earlier. Whatever your reason, that's fine with us. Of course if you stay, you can continue to enjoy all the benefits ABCPool provides; nothing is changing there.

We hope this explanation clears things up a bit. You are free to ask any question you have about the pool's workings. We will however not go into too much detail because the competition is always watching.



There were a few comments in this thread recently that are inviting a reply:

infos like round stats, block history, top hashers would be nice to have?

lmfao

Anyway they do not mine blocks or have rounds so they can't post this...

We may list block history and top hashers in the future. There are no rounds however because we pay per share, not per round. See also https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=33586.msg685134#msg685134

So what I do know and can prove is that ABC was sending me hashing power and they were getting paid 105% for this.

Some of ABCPool hashpower went to Goat’s project, around a million shares.

I did not DDOS them, I do not even know why you would think that was related.

The DDOS is indeed a completely separate incident, involving thousands of hosts. Goat had nothing to do with it. Now that the countermeasures are in place, we will supply a post-mortem on the DDOS shortly.

Happy hashing everyone!
MC & Chlorine

[Eveofwar]

So you effectively made ~9% off your miners by going to Goat ?

4% fee + 5% bonus.

[MintCondition]

And on a completely unrelated note... I see that my invalids have shot up to almost 5% since yesterday..  Any idea what is up with that?

Sigg

They are implementing load balancing to their servers and it isn't 100% yet. 

You are hitting the nail on the head despoiler. Although we tested successfully under light load, the switch did not go altogether smoothly when it was rolled out in full. Those issues have been resolved last night. We will report on the DDOS and the countermeasures shortly.

[Hawkix]

But if we could somehow decrease that enormous risk, the required buffer could also be a lot smaller. That’s why we now do what most miners do. They consider solo mining too risky, and aggregate their mining power with the mining power of others by joining a pool. Or in our case, joining several pools.

What pools, specifically? I hope all miners here understand that it is very important to know what blocks they are contributing to solve to. Nowadays, pools are necessary evil, but "pool proxy" is rather dangerous thing.

[MintCondition]

So you effectively made ~9% off your miners by going to Goat ?

4% fee + 5% bonus.

Not exactly. The experiment with gigaminer was small (about a million shares), but a complete disaster. We ended up paying our miners for about 200,000 valid shares which have been rejected upstream.

ABC miners are always credited for every valid share they submit as long as it’s not a duplicate. Even if an 'upstream pool' later turns out to reject the share, the original miner is still credited.

That's another way that we create a predictable experience for our miners, which cost us quite a bit in this instance.

[jamesg]

MintCondition,

Could you please be more specific about what pools you are mining on and how you choose which pools you are mining. Are you using bithopper, or some other custom software?

It would seem that while you have "come clean" about what you are doing with shares you have not explained the how.

Are you pool hopping proportional pools with other miner's hashes?

Thanks,
gigavps

[jake262144]

Hey Gigavps, that's PRECISELY what worries me about projects such as Goat's.
"We'll give you 1xx%!" looks good on paper but that money HAS to come from somewhere and Goat wasn't Santa Claus last time I checked.
The official explanation is that the hash power is being rented, which of course cuts the further debate as everything else is considered a "trade secret".
I wouldn't touch such a scheme with a ten feet pole.

Mint, any comment?

[kano]

So you effectively made ~9% off your miners by going to Goat ?

4% fee + 5% bonus.

Not exactly. The experiment with gigaminer was small (about a million shares), but a complete disaster. We ended up paying our miners for about 200,000 valid shares which have been rejected upstream.

ABC miners are always credited for every valid share they submit as long as it’s not a duplicate. Even if an 'upstream pool' later turns out to reject the share, the original miner is still credited.

That's another way that we create a predictable experience for our miners, which cost us quite a bit in this instance.

Could you please explain this properly.

As far as I see it, it is your choice of where you sent the hashing that caused this problem.
So of course you should pay for the problems you cause - it would make no sense why people who mine at your pool should pay for that.
Had you processed the shares yourself, the stales would not have been anything like that
No pool should be having 20% stales, ever! ... all but foolish members would leave such a pool.

[MintCondition]

Could you please be more specific about what pools you are mining on and how you choose which pools you are mining. Are you using bithopper, or some other custom software?

It would seem that while you have "come clean" about what you are doing with shares you have not explained the how.

Are you pool hopping proportional pools with other miner's hashes?

Hey Gigavps, that's PRECISELY what worries me about projects such as Goat's.
"We'll give you 1xx%!" looks good on paper but that money HAS to come from somewhere and Goat wasn't Santa Claus last time I checked.
The official explanation is that the hash power is being rented, which of course cuts the further debate as everything else is considered a "trade secret".
I wouldn't touch such a scheme with a ten feet pole.

Mint, any comment?

Good point jake.
At some point we'll have to play the trade secret card too. There's a lot of smart people in the Bitcoin community, some of whom may already be thinking about launching a similar service.

What I can say is that we're using a variety of sources. We mix those both to spread the block-finding risk as much as possible, and to ensure a stable experience for our miners. The most important thing for us, and indeed the whole idea behind launching ABCPool originally, is to provide miners the most predictable mining experience possible: known rewards, low stales, low latency, high uptime. It turns out there are lots of pools out there that are barely functioning, so balancing stability and risk is quite a challenge.

As for the software/hardware, see http://www.abcpool.co/about.php. I cannot stress enough how heavily we customized Pushpool, to the point it's almost unrecognizable. Many hours went into that. You also mentioned Bithopper. ABCPool does not use Bithopper, or any custom mining software for that matter (besides pushpool and simplecoin of course).

[MintCondition]

So you effectively made ~9% off your miners by going to Goat ?
4% fee + 5% bonus.

Not exactly. The experiment with gigaminer was small (about a million shares), but a complete disaster. We ended up paying our miners for about 200,000 valid shares which have been rejected upstream.

ABC miners are always credited for every valid share they submit as long as it’s not a duplicate. Even if an 'upstream pool' later turns out to reject the share, the original miner is still credited.

That's another way that we create a predictable experience for our miners, which cost us quite a bit in this instance.

Could you please explain this properly.

Hi Kano,
I don't know for sure that I understand what needs additional explanation, but I'll try!

As far as I see it, it is your choice of where you sent the hashing that caused this problem.

It sure is.

So of course you should pay for the problems you cause - it would make no sense why people who mine at your pool should pay for that.

I completely agree, that's why we set it up that way. We absorb that risk, so our miners know that their shares are always counted. Luckily this problem has only happened once on this scale.

Had you processed the shares yourself, the stales would not have been anything like that

Yes, they would probably be a lot lower.

No pool should be having 20% stales, ever! ... all but foolish members would leave such a pool.

We intend to prevent shares from being routed through the project #2 pool in the future. We've now seen that it does not work when pools forward shares to each other in a circle. Who would have thought?