Laurentia Pool - BAD risk for miners

[Biffa]

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

Surely if you mined on a small PPLNS pool then you would care if a block was missed due to it having a massive impact on your earnings along with everyone else on the pool.

The bigger the pool the less likelyhood of it having an impact on you, especially if the pool is PPS.

But the danger is, it is all relative, if a big pool is losing blocks due to bad code or infrastructure, or you build a big pool based on bad code or infrastructure then it does become a big deal. Because a big pool will lose lots of blocks, or at least potentially a string of them before its noticed and something is done about it.

Fact is some big pools have lost lots of blocks due to either bad code or due to not being aware of what is going on down to the minutiae of information or not having the log files to check back, or just not caring. The history is there to see.

I can understand it not being a big concern on your part because of your mining strategy, although I would question why anyone would continue to mine on a solo pool that has demonstrably lost blocks on more than one occassion. The potential loss of earnings is just too high.

[MoparMiningLLC]

[...]

I understood - and in all of my replies, I never said I was addressing your question - why? because I knew I could not answer it, I simply was addressing how easy it is to be completely aware of whether your blocks found are being dropped/lost/orphaned by the pool.

each time I commented you would say I failed to address your question - I was never trying to

as long as no one is mad here I am good. I wish I had your hash rate btw - maybe by next year

happy mining!

[mikeywith]

Surely if you mined on a small PPLNS pool then you would care if a block was missed due to it having a massive impact on your earnings along with everyone else on the pool.

That makes sense, this also answers a part of the question by the way, thanks for pointing that out.

The history is there to see.

I am aware of this, I am also aware of that fact that things now are different, hence the reason why I said

highly unlikely that nowadays pps pools lose a block for any reason but "bad luck"

although I would question why anyone would continue to mine on a solo pool that has demonstrably lost blocks on more than one occassion.

Everyone has a different point of view, I can't speak for those who still mine on Cksolo and even went to as far as paying for the server, to me personally I have good memories with the pool, and I trust CK, he explained exactly what went wrong and he made sure he corrected it, and what's more important than this are MANNERS, something some people lack, CK has been respectful and nice to most of us, I would go to the extent of paying solely for the server and point a good portion of my hash rate to Cksolo, this is more of a culture thing I suppose, I am sure many people don't mind dealing with people who show no manners, and all that matters to them is the business itself, to me, respect and attitude matter, will I lose a block on Cksolo pool? no problem, I still wouldn't mine to a pool whose owner calls someone who is probably at the age of their father "stupid".

happy mining!

You too.

[kano]

I moved the reply to where it belongs:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5251592.msg54514603#msg54514603

[mikeywith]

You are ignoring facts and the most obvious of those is the fact that my pool has found 2429 blocks so far.
No empty blocks in there.

2429 blocks is NOTHING in the grand scheme of things, the pools in my analysis each of them probably found 100000% more blocks than your pool did ( lazy to do the maths but my estimate was rather conservative i suppose), what i wrote above is a simple statistical point, it is not what I think, the numbers state that the chances for your pool to find an empty or orphan block are slim to nothing, it is like someone who drives once a year around his empty farm and brags about the fact that he got into less car accidents than Michael Schumacher, thinking he has better driving skills when in reality it is merely statistics and probability doing their thing.

You obviously do not understand how work is generated by a pool and how a block can be empty, without the pool purposely producing an empty block like most of the large pools still do.

I understand very well that mathematically empty blocks MUST happen unless the time it takes to download a block, verify transactions, deal with the mempool, build a block =< zero ms, which is not true even if you claim so, even if all pools run on the same LAN with block size being 1byte time will never be =< 0, there will always be empty blocks and there will always be orphan blocks, this is unfortunately how the math works, your words and attempts to deny these facts mean nothing, nobody in their right mind will think that pools purposely mine empty blocks when fees alone are 2btc at times, except for the obvious use of covert asicboost and the other reasons I explained in my topic which you used to advertise your pool  .

So yeah maybe less than half a dozen possible empty blocks in 6 years for all pools on the network - the rest are them doing it on purpose.

Lol there is no "maybe", if you know the time it takes to download a block all the way to reconstructing it, you can tell EXACTLY how many empty blocks could be found without anyone doing it purposely, people have been studying statistics for hundreds of years not for you to randomly state that "less than half a dozen", i explained in a great detail what is concidered reasonable and what formula to use to figure that out, read the topic again and actually try to learn something.

... before you decide to post incorrect information to promote your argument.

Well all i did was use Siméon Denis Poisson's formulas, if you have a problem with it complain to him (sadly he passed away a few hundred years back or so).

P.S. I'm probably older than you

Was reffering to someone else you called stupid, was the first comment of yours i read when i joined the forum, i knew from the start what type of a person you likely were, time has only proved my intial guess.

Edit: the above is of course actually related to this thread.

On a side note (Again), this topic doesn't belong to the mining board by any means, you are accusing another pool of something, it only fits reputation/service discussion since it is not your pool you are advertising.

Going to put you on ignore for a few months, hopefully you would learn how to communicate with respect and manners by then.

Adiós.

[kano]

I moved the reply to where it belongs:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5251592.msg54514603#msg54514603

[minefarmbuy]

Our server is highly optimized and more efficient than any other pool on market. Full stop.

I would invite everyone to read our whitepaper and note the section on networking which was drafted by -ck with minuscule edits (a few double spaces). We have optimized mining conditions for the user in every avenue and provided a hyper competitive product against any scoring scheme including PPS. Our limited user space is specifically designed to produce optimal coinbase transactions for the group. I would be happy to elaborate more in our own thread but technical questions may have to be differed to -ck which his focus on bitcointalk will likely be his own products and projects.

Mine Farm Buy LLC is to manage clients and our front end while -ck is to manage server, code, payout and is literally the only person we would trust to do so (which other pool operators obviously are malicious and produce loss to their users, ie. changing scoring scheme).

This is a completely separate product and not intended to replace a beloved community pool in ckpool.org which was closed at the sole discretion of -ck himself and after our soft launch. 

Kano is using this thread to promote his own product, in a poor attempt to discredit our hard work and personnel knowingly full well -ck refuses to interact with him due to his condescending, self destructive, alienating nature. 

We have done exceptional work bring our model to market and have very much limited the "BAD risk" that other pools overlook to their users by thoughtful design, experience, and market analysis. Again, making this thread baseless defamation and conjecture, and obviously extremely biased.

Everyone is allowed to post constructive feedback in our own thread. Please note Kano knowingly posted inflammatory, baseless content there to be removed and under the guise of censorship opened this thread which isn't any different. He and all are welcome to join us there, all we ask is people interact with a small sense of courtesy when directing comments specifically at individuals.

Thank you though to Kano for promoting our services for us, hits on our landing page have been highly accelerated of late. Unfortunately this will be last reply here, as hopefully the reasons for this decision are abundantly clear. #mineon

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Kano is using this thread to promote his own product

And just where has he said anything in this thread that can be construed as Marketing of his pool? Nowhere. It started as a way to bring to light valid concerns regarding the pool software used and its known problems in the past. I agree the title is a bit over the top but at least it got the conversations going

When specific points have been brought up he states what he has done regarding those points. Ja he tends to also point out what others have not done - so what? As a counter point one can always explain why they think his solutions are unnecessary. This is a technical discussion after all and that is how discussions are supposed to work...

empty blocks MUST happen unless the time it takes to download a block, verify transactions, deal with the mempool, build a block =< zero ms, which is not true even if you claim so, even if all pools run on the same LAN with block size being 1byte time will never be =< 0, there will always be empty blocks and there will always be orphan blocks,

The only time an empty block MUST happen is the very very rare times mempool is empty. Aside from that, generating empty blocks is a conscious decision made by the operators of certain large pools. They are not a random event that any pool might do in the course of normal operations.

Orphans are another story and mainly related just to how fast a pool connects with the rest of the BTC network to make it known they found a valid block and have their block included into the next work generated vs a different block found at nearly the same time. As such, yes any pool can and will from time to time have orphans but a well connected pool should have very few.

[philipma1957]

I would like to point out that lifetimes stats for luck on kano.is

are 101.17%   for 2429 blocks

but that for the last 1000 blocks

the luck is 96.02%

and for the last 500 blocks

the luck is 92.41 %

This last 500 blocks took 153.8 weeks

153.8 weeks is very close to 3 years ago.

May 27 2017 is  3 years ago.

June 15 or June June 16 2017 is 153.8 weeks ago

My point is once BTC became valuable or more valuable

Kano.is has had really bad luck.

Coinbase price on:

 June 11 2017   about  3000
 July  13  2017  about  2300
 Aug  14  2017  about  4300
 Sept 15  2017  about  3700
 Oct   17 2017   about  5500

May 27   2020   about  9200

I could go on and since I am a stupid moron I will go on.

500/.92 = 543.47

so kano.is is off 43.47 blocks since his last 500 blocks made.

So As a stupid moron I ask why has kano.is had brutal luck over the last 500 blocks made by the pool.

Why did kano.is have great luck  when they made the first 1929 blocks

the luck was so good when blocks were worth very little
the luck is brutal when blocks became valuable.

Does it mean anything?  I don't know I am a stupid moron.

but 105% for 1929 blocks.   coins under 3000

and 92%  for 500 blocks.     coins over 3000

So  even if solo.ckpool sucks and lost 3 to 4 blocks out of 255 blocks

kano.is has had a 500 block 153.8 week unlucky streak.

But as i said I am a stupid moron.  Please correct my math if I made any errors.

Personally if possible I would mine in a:

 kano.is solo pool
 solo.ckpool

 pps+ pool

[NotFuzzyWarm]

...
But as i said I am a stupid moron.  Please correct my math if I made any errors.
Personally if possible I would mine in a:

 kano.is solo pool
 solo.ckpool

 pps+ pool

A moron? Hardly.
Yes kanopool's luck has not been great after the pool had a prolonged run of bad luck forcing some very large players to go elsewhere last year. Thing is, registered users have access to a very clear stats page regarding blocks found and pool Luck. Its users have summarized full data, warts and all, going back to the start of the pool to base their decisions on. Few if any other pools do that.

Since you brought it up this is not marketing: a Kano solo pool is in the works. While he will understandably still not welcome miners using 3rd-party firmware hacks, the solo WILL accept rentals.

Along those lines btw, in late 2017 (?) there was an issue with both MR and NH rental services that really skewed work received through them for well over a month - that is why they were banned from the main pool. Similar to the Slush/Genesis kerfuffle some very large (and since was a 5ND PPLNS pool, very long term) rentals were getting an unwarranted share of miner rewards from blocks found by others. It was only because full logs of miner performance and pool-state are kept in KDB that the issue and root cause was discovered which led to the rentals ban. With a solo pool that becomes a moot point.

[DaveF]

Somewhere, sometime in the past I actually posted something similar to what mikeywith said about preferring to mine in a friendlier environment with a more pleasant operator.

As the saying goes time is money, and if I have to spend *time* dealing with an issue because the person running the pool does not want to, or has the mentality that "it's never my fault, I do a better job then everyone else" then I don't mine there. Because, with the equipment I have after electric & everything else I am only netting about $500 a month. It's not worth it for a few extra bucks to get grief and waste a 1/2 day dealing with something.

Case in point. I spend a lot of time dealing with network routing. I was having issues connecting to a certain pool years ago. Sent the operator detailed logs, showed him where the issue was in his network / data provider and then got back a reply that it had to be my fault everyone else was connecting fine. Guess what, they were not, they just did not notice that what should have been a 10ms to 40ms response depending on where they were was actually closer to 125ms. I showed again what the issue was and posted in the thread where it was. And the post got deleted. So I left.

Since you brought it up this is not marketing: a Kano solo pool is in the works. While he will understandably still not welcome miners using 3rd-party firmware hacks, the solo WILL accept rentals.

Unless I am missing something if it's solo then 3rd party firmware should not matter.

Stay safe.

-Dave

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Getting OT here but,

Unless I am missing something if it's solo then 3rd party firmware should not matter.

It matters because as one of the major developers of cgminer who worked with -ck, Kano takes great umbrage towards folks that violate the GPL license.  -ck not caring anymore about that point is up to him.

In my book he rightly refuses to support folks who do not care about copyright and usage licenses. He cannot reasonably block equipment from Bitmain, MicroBT and a few others that started the chain of violation but he can keep the far smaller number of folks from using 3rd party mods of it on his pool.

[mikeywith]

The only time an empty block MUST happen is the very very rare times mempool is empty. Aside from that, generating empty blocks is a conscious decision made by the operators of certain large pools. They are not a random event that any pool might do in the course of normal operations.

This is a misconception spread by Kano to advertise his pool.

Empty blocks MUST happen regardless of everything else, I can go with the technical explanation of why must they happen, but since I have already explained that I'll refer you to aantonop.

Now let's take simple practical examples.

Today viabtc mined an empty block 631926 , the next block had 0.46 in fees, yesterday 1THash&58COIN mined an empty block 631806 and block 631807 had 0.75BTC in fees.

Are you implying that these pools are sacrificing thousands of dollars for nothing? does a pool that owns 10% or 20% or 30% of the network hashrate run an inadequate code or slow servers?? of course NOT.

Empty blocks will ALWAYS come by because the time it takes to download and verify the transactions of the previous blocks is >0 and <x and the probability of hitting a block between 0 and x seconds is always there, the pools will have two options.

1- Wait until they verify the transactions of the last block.
2- Risk putting transactions which were included in the previous block.

Number 1 is risky because another pool might beat you to it, Number 2 is risky because if you include a transaction from the previous block your block will be invalid and nobody in their mind will take that risk.

If the above is still hard to digest, take a look at the number of empty blocks mined this year, exactly 14 empty blocks for each month

Jan 14 empty blocks.
Feb 14 empty blocks.
March 14 empty blocks.
April 14 empty blocks.

Those empty blocks are found by various different pools, what does that mean?

A- Pool operators sit together in a closed room and decided how much money they want to lose.
B- Statistics, maths, and probability.

if you believe in A, stop reading, if not please continue.

What does finding 14 blocks mean?

every day we find 14/30 = 0.46 empty blocks = 1.63% of all blocks WILL be empty

For T = 0.46 a nd % = 1.63

exp(−TimefromSeconds/AverageBlocktime)−exp(−TimetoSeconds/Averageblocktime) = 0.016 > 1.63%

exp(−1/60)−exp(−2/60) = 0.016 > 1.63%

This means the average time for mining pools to download and verify transactions of the previous blocks is greater than 2 seconds, anything that falls between >0 and <200ms WILL HAVE to be empty, Kano can't do shit about, Pools can't avoid it, Satoshi can't fix it, Albert Einstein won't bother with trying to change it.

In my book he rightly refuses to support folks who do not care about copyright and usage licenses. He cannot reasonably block equipment from Bitmain, MicroBT and a few others that started the chain of violation but he can keep the far smaller number of folks from using 3rd party mods of it on his pool.  -ck not caring anymore on that point is up to him.

or he doesn't give a shit about Cgminer license, but he is an attention seeker, and since

1- Bitmain, Microbt won't be wasting their time replying to him > no attention
2- Most of the custom firmware devs are active on this forum and they will reply to him > attention received

Add to that the fact that the majority of mining gears probably run stock firmware (which violate the GPL license a million times more than these custom firmware ran on a relatively small number of miners) the loss in profit that comes with blocking stock firmware that violate that exact same license is way too huge for his pool to handle, but the small quantity of miners running custom firmware is not a big loss.

So Bitmain and MicroBT violate Cgminer license > No problem, you can mine to my pool. Two or three custom firmware violate Cgminer license> You can't mine to my pool because I argued with you on the forum and I told you that you were wrong, my ego doesn't let me.

If kano REALLY cares about the Cgminer license as he pretends, he MUST block all Bitmain and Microbt firmware from mining to his pool/s, if he doesn't do that, I can only call this "hypocrisy", and I won't be surprised if after 1-2 years custom firmware dominates the mining gears, he will allow them to use his pool.

[philipma1957]

I know kano has had a very small next to nothing tx fee block.

I don't recall if it was under 30 seconds for sure.  I think the clock times were 9 or 17 seconds.  He was close to a fee less block.

Part of the empty blocks are due to manipulation and skipping the last transaction from the previous block.  Thus a very fast "empty" block.  But a block none the less.

So would you rather hit 5 blanks a month.  Or all the blanks have a small amount of tx fees but you don't get the 5 you lose one to a guy that went shortcut method.

I wonder which is better.  It would be really hard to determine how many small fee fast blocks happen for a pool using kano's method vs 1 extra block empty via the shortcut method.

If both are legal it is a pool operators choice to do one or the other.

As block reward 1/2 's more pools may not choose the faster method as tx rewards are greater.

But as I said I truly do know how stupid I am and will continue to be. So I just like friendly people to run my pools.  I am not going to get rich here. so why argue.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

This is a misconception spread by Kano to advertise his pool.

Empty blocks MUST happen regardless of everything else, I can go with the technical explanation of why must they happen, but since I have already explained that I'll refer you to aantonop.

<massive snip regarding SPV mining>

And I refer you to what you talking about - SPV mining which is a subject wholly off-topic here.That said, one last bit about it from Core developer Gregory Maxwell that he posted long ago on Reddit Very salient point he says at the end:

SPV makes a very strong security assumption that the hashrate of the network is verifying transactions. At least under some conditions this assumption has proven invalid.

The fact remains that it is up to the pool operator to decide to use it or not. Kano does not and only references fully validated blocks - not just the headers. Ergo - no empty blocks.

re: 'Hypocrisy over cgminer usage by manufacturers and hacks thereof, I refer you to the more appropriate thread were I answered that.

[kano]

I moved the reply to kano.is where it belongs.
No idea why Phil is posting 'questions' about kano.is here
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=789369.msg54514542#msg54514542

[mikeywith]

Well i know that i was talking about SPV mining, but don't nearly all pools conduct spv mining? If kano does not then he must state things as they are, in his reply to my topic he makes it seem like he is magically beating the odds, which is not the case.

Also fully validating blocks the way he does it "taking your words for it because I don't know if he does" lowers the pool chances of finding blocks, those who mine to his pool waste a portion of their hash power "doing nothing" until the previous block's transactions are validated and thus risking a potential empty block (The exact reasons why most large pools do the opposite)

I am not implying that one thing is better than the other to bitcoin as a whole, simply stating the potential risk and loss in the way he conducts his pool, as you may already know most miners would prefer not to risk losing a block by wasting a few seconds of mining for the sake of block rewards ( the majority probably don't care about anything but fiat profit), if Kano does that he should make it clear and then miners can chose if they want to use his pool or not, but he doesn't do that, he simply uses that fact to advertise his pool, the same thing he is doing now in this thread and his thread by attacking Ckpool, Laurentia pool and nearly all pools, every pool except for his is a terrible pool according to him.

Anyway, i am out of here, @NotFuzzyWarm thanks for the civilized conversation and friendly attitude, if people won't learn anything new from this discussion they could at least learn to be polite.

[Biffa]

Well i know that i was talking about SPV mining, but don't nearly all pools conduct spv mining? If kano does not then he must state things as they are, in his reply to my topic he makes it seem like he is magically beating the odds, which is not the case.

Not only does kano.is not conduct SPV mining, neither does ckpool nor does your pool. Empty blocks was not what this topic was concerning.

Also fully validating blocks the way he does it "taking your words for it because I don't know if he does" lowers the pool chances of finding blocks, those who mine to his pool waste a portion of their hash power "doing nothing" until the previous block's transactions are validated and thus risking a potential empty block (The exact reasons why most large pools do the opposite)

I am not implying that one thing is better than the other to bitcoin as a whole, simply stating the potential risk and loss in the way he conducts his pool, as you may already know most miners would prefer not to risk losing a block by wasting a few seconds of mining for the sake of block rewards ( the majority probably don't care about anything but fiat profit), if Kano does that he should make it clear and then miners can chose if they want to use his pool or not, but he doesn't do that, he simply uses that fact to advertise his pool, the same thing he is doing now in this thread and his thread by attacking Ckpool, Laurentia pool and nearly all pools, every pool except for his is a terrible pool according to him.

Just to be clear, no-one is attacking ckpool or Laurentia pool for mining empty blocks. I'm not sure why you brought empty blocks into the discussion, the first mention of it in this thread is in post 18

[kano]

... and a minor update to this regarding the white paper.

The Fibre block relay was shut down yesterday.
So getting your blocks to other pools fast, now depends entirely on your own block distribution and worldwide node network connectivity.

Thus Laurentia would expect a higher orphan rate (LOST blocks) than any pool that does have a good worldwide distribution of nodes ... like my pool does.

... and related to that, whoever wrote in the white paper about the irrelevant issue of multiple nodes finding more than one block at the same time, clearly has no understanding of that.
It doesn't matter if 2 miners find 2 blocks at the same time. Of course you will only get one, no matter what you do about that.
However, it is ALWAYS possible for 2 miners to find blocks at the same time no matter where they mine, even on the same node.

The biggest issue with ckpool about this, is that it hides this information.
Like the last block that pool lost, no one knew about it except the miner, until the pool OP was prompted to look into it.
Aside: if that happened with a rental service, no one would ever know if you can't check with the rental service best shares or blocks found.

My KDB displays ALL blocks found by all miners on the pool, immediately on the web site, then reports which blocks are valid/orphan/rejected/stale etc.

--

Our server is highly optimized and more efficient than any other pool on market. Full stop.
...

This is a claim you are making with zero proof - nothing to back it up.
ck has never tested his pool code performance against the other pool's code performance.
It is simply just his arrogant opinion that his pool code is "more efficient than any other pool on market"

A simple comparison I CAN make, my KDB software running on my pool, that does all the same work as the ckpool front end running on my pool except it doesn't do work generation once every 30 seconds and network IO to miners, but it does also do a lot more work processing, web site processing and accounting, uses approximately only 1/3 of the CPU of ckpool running on the same hardware with it.
This is simple for me to see, looking at the CPU usage of the two processing running on the pool, as anyone else can also verify the performance of the current git of both pieces of software - though my current KDB now has even better performance than the public git version.

[minefarmbuy]

FIBRE is non essential for LP or solo ckpool, it's loss will be missed by the network but ck pools are unaffected. So beyond that our server is extremely well connected and block switching is extremely fast for both the pool -ck hosts and LP which he co-operates specifically the server side.

Of course like you state any pool which submits a "winning" share from two miners at the same will have conflict. Our whitepaper outlines well our take on networking, and reasoning for our single node setup. I'm not sure what you're trying to argue as larger pools are starting to either adopt something similar or develop more on stratum like V2 which is mostly to support better the inefficiencies of satellite/proxy nodes within the same pool. Also we don't expect higher orphan chance, we expect less than competitors.

Our UI now although very basic displays best share so I'm not sure how we're not transparent as you claim when other pools provide less insight in these metrics, but still have the need to attack our service. Our goal as well is to use our fee to build out the UI to our users needs which could include more metrics requested by consensus. If anything we, including -ck are very open and transparent. Likely this is well known by anyone who has engaged with us before.

Everything you state in this thread is extremely assumptive, we've had great response to our whitepaper and service even from competitors. Which most are welcoming and excited to have new challengers in the sector. So it's more odd you give us soo much negative attention, then I've addressed my speculation on that in previous replies.

As for the technical aspects you'd have to consult -ck but I know that relationship is tarnished, so good luck getting answers. I'll just say there is a reason we chose new high end equipment to host our server on, to not just benefit us as operators but to benefit our users and future optimizations and efficiencies without restraint. 

The quote, those are my words and if wrong I'm happy to fall on that sword. It just shows our confidence in our product and displays without a doubt we're here to compete and drive results. I'm ok with being arrogant or perceived as in this regard, I do find it amusing though that this argument comes from you of all people here.

Please continue to feel free to slander our product and pump your own at the same time which is the theme of this thread. I just don't think you'll be able to piggyback our momentum this way.

70.1 PH in commitments so far, 230 PH needed pending network, likely less now honestly if trend continues.

"Laruentia Pool - BAD risk for miners. .. to not mine with us".

#mineon