[CLOSED] BTC Guild - Pays TxFees+NMC, Stratum, VarDiff, Private Servers

[Trongersoll]

My two Satoshi.

if you really think that the pool you are on is being short changed, move to another pool, for the little guys the payout should be close to the same.

If you feel that all the pools are being short changed, <sarcasm on>then solo mine<sarcasm off>. It is better to get short changed than nothing at all?

or, start your own pool so that you know no one is getting short changed.

or, sell your miners and buy bitcoins, that is supposed to be the best bet anyway.

[1714129431]

1714129431

[atadro]

Regarding the hard fork to make block withholding impossible:  It will never happen.  AFAIK, that hard fork would also break all existing ASICs.

Granted, a hard fork does NOT need 51% mining power to be implemented.  What matters with a hard fork is the market (people who accept/trade Bitcoin) moves to the new fork.  But unless I'm mistaken, the secret data used to prevent block withholding would be incompatible with all existing mining hardware, which will immediately make such a fork very hard to achieve.  It would more likely kill BTC entirely due to the competing standards.



As for variance/luck/withholding:  I'm monitoring closely users with bad share/block ratios.  Unfortunately, there's really not much else I can do.  It was around June 9th we had a pretty big dive.  But then we had a decent rise that roughly offset it before going into 3 days of consecutive very poor luck, caused mostly be a few 5 and 6 hour rounds.  However, the pool was at 96.8% luck for the last month before the dive, and rising.  99% is "neutral" in the sense of expectation, since you would expect a ~1% orphan rate which means 100% is actually slightly lucky.

The pool has not grown significantly, nor has the difficulty risen in the last 3 days.  The current dip appears to be luck, not withholding, based on the fact that the long rounds mean all the prior speed (11-12 PH/s), which was performing right within expectation for most the last month, weren't finding blocks for 5-6 hours along with the new speed that joined.

Are these known miners with known 'issues' back at BTCGuild?  If so, are they currently getting full payouts by the guild?  Did they previously get full payouts?

[opentoe]

So any miner can join the pool and screw shit up? And how do they accomplish this? Aren't there triggers that go off when it starts to happen? And I tried going back multiple pages and can't find anything about what's really going on or happened.

[guytechie]

Anyone seen this?  Specifically the block withholding attack at the bottom of the roundup.

http://www.coindesk.com/mining-roundup-bbb-warning-alpha-technology-pool-attack/

[xstr8guy]

Anyone seen this?  Specifically the block withholding attack at the bottom of the roundup.

http://www.coindesk.com/mining-roundup-bbb-warning-alpha-technology-pool-attack/

It's been the topic of conversation for quite some time.

[Entropy-uc]

I clicked back in the thread to 05-10-14 (3 months back from 8-10-14) and didn't see any mentioned to the withholding attack.  Is there a separate thread detailing this discovery?

A lot of the discussion ended up off thread because Micheal censored it (before discovering a giant obvious source of the problem when he actually bothered to check).

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=597112.0

All the evidence suggests there is a lot more going on than this one player in China who is taking the heat at the moment.

I stick with what I said over a month ago.  If stratum isn't revised so that pools can validate the integrity of the workers they are paying, pool mining is doomed.  We switched pools as a first response to the issue, but now that pool has some extremely suspicious users, so now I am leaning toward going solo.

[MoreBloodWine]

This isn't meant to be a negative but people don't generally invest more time or money in to something that what they feel isn't required until something like everyone leaving happens which in this case never will because some people just accept stuff for what it is when it isn't which with shit like luck is easily argued away with luck being what it is by nature.

Stupid ass analogy but...

Here's a paper bag for your groceries, we could have opted for plastic which is generally stronger but we wanted to save the store som money. Just be careful with the paper and it shouldn't rip thus dropping your groceries all over the ground.

[Entropy-uc]

This isn't meant to be a negative but people don't generally invest more time or money in to something that what they feel isn't required until something like everyone leaving happens which in this case never will because some people just accept stuff for what it is when it isn't which with shit like luck is easily argued away with luck being what it is by nature.

Stupid ass analogy but...

Here's a paper bag for your groceries, we could have opted for plastic which is generally stronger but we wanted to save the store som money. Just be careful with the paper and it shouldn't rip thus dropping your groceries all over the ground.

This situation is more like the grocery store pouring the milk you purchased into a paper bag and then getting indignant when you ask where the all the milk you paid for went.

Eluethria admits that this one group was stripping around 20% of earnings from every participant in the pool for over a month but he hasn't done anything to recover funds and compensate those that were cheated.

[MoreBloodWine]

I can't speak anything to compensation obviously but what can he really do to recover ?

I mean, lets say I steal money from a bank. I hide it really well, sure I go to jail buy unless some dumb ass stumbles upon my stash which doesn't apply to this situation, the money will always remain un-recovered. Point being there's nothing he can really do to reover anything.

This isn't meant to be a negative but people don't generally invest more time or money in to something that what they feel isn't required until something like everyone leaving happens which in this case never will because some people just accept stuff for what it is when it isn't which with shit like luck is easily argued away with luck being what it is by nature.

Stupid ass analogy but...

Here's a paper bag for your groceries, we could have opted for plastic which is generally stronger but we wanted to save the store som money. Just be careful with the paper and it shouldn't rip thus dropping your groceries all over the ground.

This situation is more like the grocery store pouring the milk you purchased into a paper bag and then getting indignant when you ask where the all the milk you paid for went.

Eluethria admits that this one group was stripping around 20% of earnings from every participant in the pool for over a month but he hasn't done anything to recover funds and compensate those that were cheated.

[Sir Alan]

I think the site's FAQ needs updating, as the following is no longer quite true, one confirmation now being required since the demise of PPS:

BTC Guild's PPLNS system does not require block confirmations for blocks to apply

[nbtcminer]

Is nothing being done to get back the money stolen by 17JkL94B2ngJg4QQZuiozDQjnxXB6B7yTc and 1Gu8zxRi8cyENV8CQe52D7QEsiZ7ruT73u? Or did we just get screwed for the last few weeks?

[Entropy-uc]

I can't speak anything to compensation obviously but what can he really do to recover ?

I mean, lets say I steal money from a bank. I hide it really well, sure I go to jail buy unless some dumb ass stumbles upon my stash which doesn't apply to this situation, the money will always remain un-recovered. Point being there's nothing he can really do to reover anything.

A start would be to refund all the fees collected for the period in question.  Michael was asleep at the switch so he didn't earn his cut.  Well maybe he was asleep, it's strange that he removed PPS in the same time frame, guaranteeing that he wouldn't take losses even if his users did.

Sincd (one of) the offender(s) are still mining at BTCguild current earning could be seized just like Eligius has done.

[tuanvie]

I just found this thread,
and will go to the site to read and just try if I was interested in this

[Sir Alan]

There's a lot of accusations flying around here.  Now IIRC the issue was that some big miners did not appear to be pulling their weight in terms of blocks solved against hash power, and this turned out to be a previously undetected flaw in the software which resulted in results not being submitted.  After they were suspended and investigated, it seems the error was found and corrected and they are now mining again.  If that is actually what happened, then they have not stolen anything.  OK, they may have inadvertently diluted everybody's earnings, but that is not theft;  one could argue that they were suffering as well by not getting their share of any blocks they should have declared.  If I'm wrong (and I really can't be bothered to go back and read all through it again) then I'm sure somebody will put me right.

Do you know for certain whether your own mining rigs are submitting results correctly?  I certainly don't, and I doubt that you do, for with the difficulty at its current level most small miners are now unlikely ever to solve a block, and any fault won't show up statistically.  But even knowing that you are probably only taking and not giving, you are presumably happy to accept a share of the pool.  Are you stealing from the other pool members?  I think not - after all, that's why we joined the pool.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing when apportioning blame.

[hurricandave]

There's a lot of accusations flying around here.  Now IIRC the issue was that some big miners did not appear to be pulling their weight in terms of blocks solved against hash power, and this turned out to be a previously undetected flaw in the software which resulted in results not being submitted.  After they were suspended and investigated, it seems the error was found and corrected and they are now mining again.  If that is actually what happened, then they have not stolen anything.  OK, they may have inadvertently diluted everybody's earnings, but that is not theft;  one could argue that they were suffering as well by not getting their share of any blocks they should have declared.  If I'm wrong (and I really can't be bothered to go back and read all through it again) then I'm sure somebody will put me right.

Do you know for certain whether your own mining rigs are submitting results correctly?  I certainly don't, and I doubt that you do, for with the difficulty at its current level most small miners are now unlikely ever to solve a block, and any fault won't show up statistically.  But even knowing that you are probably only taking and not giving, you are presumably happy to accept a share of the pool.  Are you stealing from the other pool members?  I think not - after all, that's why we joined the pool.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing when apportioning blame.

+++++ my 1

[eleuthria]

There's a lot of accusations flying around here.  Now IIRC the issue was that some big miners did not appear to be pulling their weight in terms of blocks solved against hash power, and this turned out to be a previously undetected flaw in the software which resulted in results not being submitted.  After they were suspended and investigated, it seems the error was found and corrected and they are now mining again.  If that is actually what happened, then they have not stolen anything.  OK, they may have inadvertently diluted everybody's earnings, but that is not theft;  one could argue that they were suffering as well by not getting their share of any blocks they should have declared.  If I'm wrong (and I really can't be bothered to go back and read all through it again) then I'm sure somebody will put me right.

This is correct.  And the problem is, you CANNOT detect it early.  It's literally impossible.  Just like the pool can have rounds taking 5-8x difficulty worth of shares to solve a block, individual users do as well.  This means at current difficulty, you cannot even begin to SUSPECT a user until they have submitted ~60b shares without a solve.  And even then, it is absolutely possible that they are unlucky.  It only becomes likely something is wrong at the 80-90b share mark (and even that isn't proof, it just means the odds aren't good for simple bad luck).

The user that was not submitting blocks IS back on BTC Guild.  They have NOT been withholding blocks since their return.  There are more than the 2 accounts identified at Eligius involved.  Since they have come back, their expected blocks vs submitted blocks has been perfect (1 of the accounts is actually fairly far ahead of expectation).

[hurricandave]

If we look at Most Shares Submitted (All Time) under rankings, the number 25 contributor has ~65 billion as a reference point. That leaves a lot of catching up for many, many, others.

[jonnybravo0311]

OK, they may have inadvertently diluted everybody's earnings, but that is not theft;  one could argue that they were suffering as well by not getting their share of any blocks they should have declared.

This is the incorrect part of your statement.  The owners of those addresses were indeed profiting from their mining.  When somebody else in the pool found a block, the shares were paid out to all miners that had contributed, including the ones withholding blocks.

If it was indeed a coding error that was subsequently caught and fixed, the miner should return some portion of the proceeds they earned in error, since those earnings aren't rightfully theirs.  Instead, the owner of the addresses in question started a thread demanding that Eligius pay them over 200BTC, even after admitting their custom version of cgminer was faulty.

[guytechie]

If Eligius is withholding payment to this user (and rightfully so), will he redistribute those 200 BTC to the other members?

And what about here on BTC Guild?

I noticed luck has gone back up.  So was it really bad luck before, or was it an attack?

[eleuthria]

If Eligius is withholding payment to this user (and rightfully so), will he redistribute those 200 BTC to the other members?

And what about here on BTC Guild?

I noticed luck has gone back up.  So was it really bad luck before, or was it an attack?

It was bad luck earlier this week.  But who knows, maybe yet another user is attacking (it isn't the previous withholders).  You can read above for why it's impossible to detect an attack unless it is sustained for long enough time to provide statistical anomalies for users.  But the bad luck spike we had lasted only a few days, and was caused by just a few very poor rounds.  The pattern does not fit an attack because we'd have a few normal length rounds, then one or two bad rounds, and then back to normal.  There weren't any significant speed fluctuations between those changes.

Eligius was able to hold 200 BTC hostage because Eligius does not pay out regularly.  BTC Guild pays out multiple times per hour.  Even if I froze the user's accounts, you'd get maybe a dozen, two dozen coins.  In return, you'd end up with some very pissed off people who already know how to weaponize their ASICs against a pool by simply reverting a patch.