hmmm, i will look at this since i am mining there...
how is the LUCK of steady mining compared to updamoon? how much out are updamoon?
what smart math dude can tell us the probability of such bad luck vs steady miners good luck?? does it look fishy or not?
I seem to be having lots of bee's rolling in, however i will take a look now a little deeper.
Actually you do not need to do a very deep analysis - the simplest way to check if there is something "off" with a certain pool is to look at a very simple comparison that every pool displays (just need to check 2 webpages, sometimes it is on one page)
- the pool hash rate (make sure that you know the average, some pools have a few big miners that are not mining continuously,
for example Steadymining had this morning only 3 workers active, after a few large contributors dropped off, so for several hours I was contributing 10% of the total pool hash rate and received rewards of 9k coins instead of the usual 2k coins - but with many hours between eeach reward since it took much longer to find blocks. Anyway, the other statistic is in their overview of blocks:
- nr of blocks found (for example, in the last day)
On Steadymining I saw that the ratio between these two was in the order of 2 blocks/day per Mh/s, since they had found 16 blocks in the last 24h and the pool hash rate had been constant at 8Mh/s
However, when I looked at Updamoon, I saw that they had a staggering hash rate (I forget how much exactly, but I believe it was 300Mh/s since I was concerned that they are getting close to 50% of the hash rate when block reward is low and the network hash rate is around 0.8 Gh/s)
However, when I looked at the nr of blocks found, I saw that it was only around 200 in the last day, which means that they find about
0.7 block/day per Mh/s or about 1/3 the blocks (and rewards) for your hashing power when mining with Updamoon, compared to mining with Steadymining.
Disclosure: I have not relation to either pool or user and have no financial ties - I don't care which pool you are mining with - if you switch then my rewards will not change. If the hash rate of Steadymining goes up then I get smaller rewards more frequently, on average it stays the same!
The only thing that I find hard to swallow is that Updamoon statistics claim that they provide over 90% of network hash power in times of low network hash rate (pool hash rate >600 while network hash rate ~650) so that means that they should find almost all blocks, but their finding rate is between 10 and 20%. Of course, we see the network hash rate jump to almost 4Gh/s when a profitable block is coming up, but even calculating with an average 2Gh/s, Updamoon is providing more than 30% of the average hash rate and the block finding rate is about half that rate.
I have seen this same behavior with other pools for other coins, what I believe is going on here is that the pool operator is creating fake workers who inject shares into the pool *without supplying actual results*, since it is simply an administrative task to maintain the database, it is simple to have one or more processes running on the pool server that are *not* hashing, but are only injecting shares in the database for fake workers.
This means that the block finding rate does not go up, but the shares do, so all rewards to all real miners get diluted by the fake workers and the pool operator will keep all these rewards. In the case of Updamoon (and other pools that I monitored and mined with) the rewards for the pool can be more than *half* the total pool revenue.
In the case of Updamoon, if they *should* have found 400 blocks in a day based on the displayed pool hash rate but the pool only finds 200 blocks, because half the claimed shares are fake, so no blocks are found by half the pool hash rate, that means that the pool only gets 200 rewards per day and half those rewards are paid out to fake workers (=pool operator) so that is half of 20M coins per day. All shares that are not actual miners are stealing from the miners in a pool (lowering the rewards for the miners) so that is why I do this calculation regularly for each pool that I consider joining. Note that there may be other reasons why the pool hash rate is higher or rewards are lower, eventually the best indicator of a good pool is how many coins you receive for a certain hash rate after a day. That is also why I published the exact numbers of how many coins I received and how much hash rate I have, so you can compare exactly to the rewards you are getting. I invite pool operators to give their opinion and proof of how their pool is actually running - independent review of the code that the pool is actually running (or any other processes that have access to the database with shares) would be good, but I have no illusions.
So, barring that, all you can do is look at payout rate and do your own due diligence by calculating how many coins you *should* be getting, compared to what the pool gives you. BTW, do not look at what the pool *expects* that you shoudl receive, since this software is often not updated from the pool running for a different coin, which means that the expectation can be several times higher than what you get or even (in the case of Steadymining) it is a small fraction of what I am receiving simply because the pool was still configured for a different coin that has a 1k reward instead of 100k average as BEE, so it shows that I can expect 20 BEE for the next block, while I see payouts in the order of 2000 BEE per block.
NOTE: I see that the pool hash rate is now higher than I have seen any time before - apparently people are actually switching pool based on the information that I am providing here. Cool!
Please make sure that your miner is running well (no HW errors and as high as possible WU/min rate for getting the best results, don't just look at hash rate - I can get higher hash rate but screw up the Work Units per min so I cannot contribute as much as with my current 210kh/s. If you have more than 1% stale rate then you should instruct your miner not to submit stale results and check ping time - is there a stratum server closer by with lower response time? No point in submitting bad shares and polluting the pool.
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