Laurentia Pool - BAD risk for miners

[kano]

This thread is following the forum rules, Frodo, do not delete it, since that will (yet again) simply be your bias, and not within the rules of the forum.

The original thread owner has deleted both my posts, so following the forum message in that thread:

This is a self-moderated topic. If you do not want to be moderated by the person who started this topic, create a new topic. (2 posts by 1 user deleted.)

Here's my reply to the OP of Laurentia Pool:

While you keep deleting my posts that actually provide information that you should take notice of,
I will make a summary, so you can take note and prove you do care about the profit and losses of those people you are convincing to mine on your pool in the future.

Firstly, as per my first deleted post on the subject, you should not use the pool software you have chosen to run the pool.
It is high risk, requires a full time developer so that the pool doesn't have weeks of outage when problems occur,
and that software has a well known history of losing blocks.

Secondly, your last post update clearly shows that someone is providing false information to you, or you are providing false information to your prospective miners. Only you will know the answer to that.

My criticising him about not testing software rather than running it untested, that he later posted a joke of a reply for the ignorant, was 1-Apr:

Re: [∞ YH] solo.ckpool.org 2% fee solo mining USA/DE 255 blocks solved!
April 01, 2020, 09:34:00 PM
Quote from: -ck on April 01, 2020, 09:32:02 PM
I will keep trying to find a workaround that suits everyone.

April 01, 2020, 09:34:00 PM
Try actually testing the changes .....................

The lost block on his pool was 10-May
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5237323.msg54403667#msg54403667
Yeah maybe he should have taken notice of my post a few weeks earlier after all ...
The claim was the server's performance was the fault, yet the replacement server is, in my opinion, below what should be used to run a pool., yet some people seem have the ignorant opinion that it could run 10 pools ...
I wonder how bad the original server was ... the same server that people were throwing large sums of mining rental money at.


Directly related to that: has anyone tested if the latest updated code in the git finds blocks correctly?
Are you waiting for his solo pool testing to succeed or fail finding a block before you go live?
It is an historical fact, on multiple occasions, that the coder has made changes in the git that lead to losing blocks due to not testing the software properly.

While you may be one of his zealots who ignores the facts, but since you are starting a pool, it would be advisable to not ignore the facts, and waste the expensive resources of those you may have convince to mine there.
I've no suggestions of what other software would be good to use, but there are, no doubt, options out there that you could consider.

Now regarding your pool whitepaper, there are a couple of issues also.

Firstly, every 2 weeks, the network difficulty changes.
This means that to keep up to a minimum target, as you have made clear in the quote below, you will need to get more hash rate on the pool every time the diff increases, if you are not above the minimum specified, not just when you start the pool. That's a tough issue that you should understand as a pool operator.

...
Our minimum average cadence is 5 blockfinds per diffadj.
...

There are issues with paying out to miners in the coinbase.
Some miners wont accept work that has a valid, but larger, coinbase.
The coinbase generated by your chosen pool software is, as is clearly stated, out of date with rewards each time it is sent to a miner.
It does not include the expectation of finding a block.
See the p2pool code about how that should be done correctly.


With the recent improved core bitcoin block distribution code (in the past couple of years), when you find a block, it can be distributed much faster than before.
However, if your coinbase is large due to including payouts in it, it will of course mean that your block distribution data will also be larger, since the coinbase transaction is the one transaction that no other bitcoin will know, and must be distributed to them all with the block.
Be wary of making it too large for miners or too large such that it slows down block distribution.

Lastly, you should understand, and comment about: if you will be using the Fibre Block Relay and how you handle when it isn't working.
The last outage of the Fibre Block Relay was the US-West node, for a number of hours recently, and thus during that time, any blocks you may have found and sent to that specific relay, will not have been distributed quickly around the world and into china, unless you have a secondary solution (like I have)
Ignoring this can easily lead to losing blocks due to stales and orphan races.
Also, not relaying your blocks yourself, directly into china, is an expectation of losing some blocks, since the largest mining pools are in china.

Feel free to ignore all this at the detriment of your miners

[1714531250]

1714531250

[1714531250]

1714531250

[minefarmbuy]

I believe this thread is referred to as defamation and your actions referred to as desperation.

There are zero issues with our code, score, or anything else. If anything laurentia pool is highly optimized for the stratum protocol without need for bloatware that only benefits multi node mining while delivering extremely low latency worldwide.
I would suggest you focus on developing your struggling user base in place of tearing down competition, likely you may receive more reward in heeding this advice and revive your pool.

Though I feel this thread/post should be removed it will serve as great motivation to continue to deliver for the user and for the space where others obviously fail and is the reason the pool exists to begin with.
I do appreciate you giving this opportunity to communicate here as I wouldn't disrupt your pool thread with baseless accusations, mud slinging, and trolling. In that regard if you follow me on twitter, you're way out of your league.

We're more than aware of incompatibility of fw on some asics and communicate to our users as appropriate so they can make the best decisions in their mining venture, and understand that our pool may not be the best choice for their equipment. We also are working on partnerships with fw developers to allow the use of these asics on our pool considering the volume of hashrate we are driving to achieve long term and would like to foster any relationship that would benefit our user base.

Our minimum cadence obviously adjusts in hashrate due to network conditions if you follow our thread or commitment page, it is updated frequently (which we've been getting numerous hits from AUS of late ). As a baseline we plan to be well beyond that mark to make relevant argument to your ranting. We are insured, plan to use funds from fee generation as proof of reserves in case of any errors in or out of our control to safety net our users work in lieu of insurance in the future.

Essentially there is zero information you can provide to us that we haven't accounted, and due to your own self destructive nature we're unlikely to take much notice either. Unless it's another desperate vie for attention like this thread. You're more than welcome to keep harassing and producing inflammatory content. If you feel you're doing the community a service here that's a wonderful soap box to be on when we're already 110% transparent.

We invite anyone with interest in our pool service to reach out at anytime. And if you have a productive thoughtful post for our pool thread Kano, it would likely not get removed.

#mineon

PS. Your pool has a high fee.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

We are insured, plan to use funds from fee generation as proof of reserves in case of any errors in or out of our control to safety net our users work in lieu of insurance in the future.

That is the one good thing I have yet read about your pool. Too bad a certain other pool op that you have partnered with did not do that to cover losses incurred when they lost yet another block on May 10.

You do realize that you are running a Financial enterprise and in more ways then 1 this is a form of accounting software, right?  Would you run any other business or personal accounting software that has not been properly vetted? I highly doubt it.

Think what you will about Kano but also know that his pool has NEVER lost a block. Part of the reason is that as one of the developers of the code you use, he is well aware of the bugs in it and he addressed them long ago. Before you ask 'then why has he not pushed them to the ckpool git' it is because -ck booted him from it when they had a falling out several years ago.

The other reason is that Kano extensively TESTS his code changes before taking them live. We already know -ck's attitude towards code testing - he believes it to be a waste of time, if it doesn't crash he considers it 'good'...

Oh, huge part of why -ck and Kano parted ways is that issue about testing and having funds set aside to cover any fups. 1 guess who firmly thought it was/is not needed.

[minefarmbuy]

We've done testnet and mainnet testing and refinement over several weeks and are 100% confident in our product.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

We've done testnet and mainnet testing and refinement over several weeks and are 100% confident in our product.

Then Kudos are in order and let's hope your confidence is justified.
I'm curious - who pushed for the testing? I hope the answer is knowledgeable investors...

[minefarmbuy]

No investors, we are 100% self funded. Giving us the control to achieve with out inhibition outside of limiting all risk possible to those poised to mine our pool.

-ck was/is the driving catalyst for all previous and current testing.

All our work makes this thread redundant and baseless as it's more aligned to discredit an individual but in place attacks our product.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

All our work makes this thread redundant and baseless as it's more aligned to discredit an individual but in place attacks our product.

No, it's point is to bring up valid concerns and allow you to address them. eg, Our concern is <subject> and your reply should be < we have done x y z to address that point>. Not a blanket 'nothing to see here, move along'.

You refuse to do so in your main thread so per your request another thread was created to do it.

You are providing a service that people will be spending a good amount of money to use in terms of hardware, power, infra, etc. I would think that said people will like to be aware of any and all 'gotcha's' and know how you have addressed them. That includes past histories of the developers.

[minefarmbuy]

We invite anyone with interest in our pool service to reach out at anytime. And if you have a productive thoughtful post for our pool thread Kano, it would likely not get removed.

Defamation and personal attacks will not be allowed in our thread. Feel free to voice constructive concerns there or to us directly.

That said Laurentia Pool is not "bad risk" to any user. This thread should be removed or at minimum re titled.

[mikeywith]

Think what you will about Kano but also know that his pool has NEVER lost a block.

How can you be so sure? "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," no?

The reason why people were aware of ckpool losing the 10th of May block for an example was the fact that the miner was mining solo, in other words, I own a lot of mining gears, I only care about the shares of 2-3 of them that are mining solo, the rest of them could be finding blocks and pool is losing some of them and I am totally unaware of it, I don't pretend to know more than you do about this subject, not making any claims, I am simply asking you a question because I can't ask Kano due to his obvious filthy attitude.  

Oh, huge part of why -ck and Kano parted ways is that issue about testing and having funds set aside to cover any fups. 1 guess who firmly thought it was/is not needed.

I also think his attitude has a lot to do with this, I rather mine to a pool whose operator would respond to me with total respect and patience regardless of the risk, rather than mining on a "better" pool owned by someone who is disrespectful., but that is just me.

[Biffa]

I also think his attitude has a lot to do with this, I rather mine with to a pool whose operator would respond to me with total respect and patience regardless of the risk, rather than mining on a "better" pool owned by someone who is disrespectful., but that is just me.

I've found neither of them to be disrespectful to me personally.

[MoparMiningLLC]

... the rest of them could be finding blocks and pool is losing some of them and I am totally unaware of it...

whether solo or not, you will know if you found a block - my miners have found blocks numerous times on other pools and I know it each time, I have also lost blocks (I think 3 times now). When reaching out to the pool operators each time, they are able to tell me why the block was lost. This is true for Slush/ViaBTC and Gos.cx (the three pools where I have lost blocks). This is irregardless of whether it is solo/pps/pplns.

While it most definitely affects your reward in solo mining, it does in pplns as well. PPS, I would say zero effect, except the pool might be changing their pps rate if they keep losing blocks.

That is my two cents.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

in other words, I own a lot of mining gears, I only care about the shares of 2-3 of them that are mining solo, the rest of them could be finding blocks and pool is losing some of them and I am totally unaware of it,

You should be aware of it. Even if not mining solo, lost blocks mean lost income for you (unless on a PPS pool). Pretty sure that you do care about that...

Any decent miner monitoring software such as AwesomeMiner can be setup to notify you and record when one of your miners thinks it has found a block. Grant you, because I do not sit all day glued to a monitor I usually find out first via Discord or the pool thread but unlike Stryfe I have been lucky enough to never have a miner report it found a block that wasn't reported by the pool as well.

[kano]

How can you be so sure? "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," no?
...

Pointless and irrelevant comment.

Every work sent to every miner, about once every 30 seconds, says in it what pool the block is for and the address it will pay to.

If you think that pools are randomly changing this and no one has ever noticed it, you clearly have no understanding for how mining actually works.

Anyone can look at the work they are mining, and you can even watch it go by with a network monitor program - in ascii for the identification of most pools.

When a block is found on the network, it will contain that text, and everyone on the planet will see it, so know which pool found it.
That's how all the block explorer sites work.

It's a ridiculous scenario you seem to want to be true, and though you may find common in the scam coin section of the forum, not here on this pool that has been around for almost 6 years:

The miner itself will also know it has found a block, so I guess you think it's a game to try and hide a block and hope no one will notice?

On top of that, mine is also the only pool that immediately reports blocks on the web site and to the miners, even if it is stale, orphan, rejected, valid or otherwise.
You can see the original code for that in the public git.
Even ck's fuck up recently would show up as a block on my pool, if the user was mining here, and I was stupid enough to allow the bitcoind to get behind on the network - however, that negligence wouldn't happen here.

Trying understanding something first ...


Aside to the ignorant person who is the subject of this thread: I'll find time soon, to show the git and forum post proof of 4 blocks lost by ck and the scenario of another related to it.

PS. Your pool has a high fee.

Your pool doesn't exist, and your god (ck) charges more than twice my pool fees ... so you should take that up with him ...

[MoparMiningLLC]

You should be aware of it. Any decent miner monitoring software such as AwesomeMiner can be setup to notify you and record when one of your miners thinks it has found a block. Grant you, because I do not sit all day glued to a monitor I usually find out first via Discord or the pool thread but unlike Stryfe I have been lucky enough to never have a miner report a found block that wasn't reported by the pool as well.

well 2 of the 3 times I have had it, it was simply someone else also submitted at the same time and thus their block accepted not mine, was on a pps pool so not any noticeable impact to my payment - the 3rd has never been fully explained to my satisfaction and is another reason why I do not use that pool anymore, it was pplns so does affect my payout - while it also affects everyone else as well so the impact is spread out.

My only point is that is very easy to see when you got a block - do most care in a pplns or pps pool? I would guess not, they worry about the pool as a whole perhaps. But no matter how you cut it, any lost block affects all versions of payouts, one way or another.

[mikeywith]

On top of that, mine is also the only pool that immediately reports blocks on the web site and to the miners, even if it is stale, orphan, rejected, valid or otherwise.

This one line answers the question, the rest of the wall of text was nothing but a waste of the forum resources and more proof of your terrible attitude for everyone else to see.

@nNotFuzzyWarm , @Stryfe

Both replies didn't answer my question, it is safe to assume that most people mine on pps pools (given the hashrate of those large pools), people pay 4% in fees to mine on Viabtc, why would they waste time or even bother if the pool loses a block?it is the pool responsablity to ensure blocks go through.

The point i was making is that many non-solo pools could be losing a ton of blocks, but because miners don't care those blocks go unoticed, now based on kano's answer (assuming he is telling the truth) miners will know if a block was stale or rejected, and without providing such features, one can't say (i never lost a block) because they could very well lose blocks and nobody would notice.

Hope i made myself clear, Thanks both.

[minefarmbuy]

Your pool doesn't exist, and your god (ck) charges more than twice my pool fees ... so you should take that up with him ...

-ck is a partner, you seem to be one to put him on a pedestal just to attempt to bring him down, let alone anyone else you decide to publicly slander. Your comments only continue to prove your issue is with an individual and not our product.

Our pool is live, we're just responsible enough not to dupe miners into losses just to make a show. We're already drafting plans to open with our 66PH to push a blockfind in about 9-10 days then have the group failover to maximize rewards for them through an adjustment period.

I still think if you put all this energy into marketing your own product you'd be more successful with your pool. But you seem want expend that energy to attempt to intimidate and belittle others, even those in your own "camp".

Still I invite you to post and everyone to post in our thread constructive feedback but obviously it's in Kano's best interest here to promote our product as "bad" which is just conjecture and personal opinion due to his disdain for our partner.

[MoparMiningLLC]

[...]

agreed - it is the pools responsibility but who wants to mine on a pool that consistently drops/loses blocks? you said you had no way to even tell. my point was it is very easy to tell. but yes, for pps it would be moot unless the pool was dropping a lot of them and thus lowered their pps rate because of that. not all pools pay the same pps rates.

[mikeywith]

I never said i had no way to tell, I said I don't care, there is a difference.

When I mine solo I set awesomeminer to send me 2 different emails when a block is found but I don't do that when I mine to a pool (mostly fpps/pps+) I don't bother, most people don't I suppose, and that was my concern when NotFuzzyWarm said that pool never lost a block, anyway the answer is now clear, as for pps pools, I am pretty sure they operate on the right server and with the proper code, highly unlikely that nowadays pps pools lose a block for any reason but "bad luck", despite the fees running a pool on fpps has a lot of risks, losing blocks is something they would never want happen.

Also, one thing to keep in mind that losing a block due to bad luck and not technical deficiencies has to do how many blocks a pool is subject to find in the first place, Kano pool hardly finds any blocks on the grand scheme of things, I even saw him brag about not mining an empty block in my empty blocks analysis topic , I didn't want to comment on his post in that section to not trigger him there and make members of that section suffer reading his disrespectful replies, it's enough that members of mining board are suffering.  

what Kano seems to don't know or ignore is that the probability of him hitting an orphan/empty block is directly related to his chances of hitting a block in the first place, given the tiny hashrate he has compared to the large pools it makes sense why he is unlikely to hit an empty or orphan block, of course, with all technical aspects like having the right code, server, and connection being equal.

Think about it this way, what is the probability of a coin landing on its side when you toss it 1 time vs 1000 time?, Kano said the time to verify and construct a block is less than 2 seconds, so applying "cumulative distribution function aka CDF of the exponential distribution" on his numbers we get:

exp(−1/60)−exp(−2/60) = 0.016 or 1.6%, all miners combined are expected to hit a block between 1 and 2 seconds at a probability of 1.6%, what is Kano's hashrate % compared to the whole network?

90,000,000TH vs 10,241THs ? 0.011%, the chances of collision with another pool and hitting an empty block are close to 0, so not finding orphan or empty blocks is fairly based on his tiny little share of the total network hashrate.

To be fair, of course, this doesn't negate that fact his pool's infrastructure is good enough to maintain his tiny 0.011% chances at 100% whereby he doesn't lose the blocks he hardly finds, so that's good overall, but it doesn't make his pool better than those pools that lose blocks due to "bad luck", and regardless of anything I highly doubt he runs a better code or owns a better server than those multi-billion $ pools, but it's good to have a few small pools around, in fact, if he wasn't such a jerk - I would point at least 2-3ph to his pool, but with his attitude, not a chance in hell.

[MoparMiningLLC]

easy man - I was not attacking you here you said you would be unaware, I was only pointing out that it is easy to tell if a block is found or lost is all so unaware is a choice is all. and I do agree in a larger pool that is pps, it wouldn't matter that much.

[mikeywith]

easy man - I was not attacking you here you said you would be unaware, I was only pointing out that it is easy to tell if a block is found or lost is all so unaware is a choice is all. and I do agree in a larger pool that is pps, it wouldn't matter that much.

I don't know how you arrived at the conclusion that I think you were attacking me. I never said that. you misunderstood my previous post, so did NFW, surprisingly and ironically only Kano understood it, so I had to explain myself, I am not attacking anybody either, all good. 

The rest of my reply is general information for everyone, not pointed directly to you.

Thanks.