Ok, so I have partially read through the locked thread and I think I have a partial idea of what the deal is, but does someone care to sum up exactly what the beef/problem/drawback of Bitcoin Pool is? Why is there a debate or a problem to begin with?
I've been contributing to it for a few days now and haven't seen a problem, but I haven't really examined it in detail, which is why I ended up in the locked thread and now here. So a summary explanation of what's going on would be great.
There have been multiple issues over time, but many had been identified and resolved due to the discussions in the original thread. Technical discussions that the owners of the pool were not happy to have even though solving the issues only made their pool stronger and better for all of its users. I personally think that the main reason that the thread appears so hostile is because the owners were taking every single technical statement personally and lashed out with hatred and obscenities.
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Here is a quick rundown of the history of the technical issues attempting to leave out the emotions and misunderstandings:
- The first big issue was over FairUser and Geebus' definition of efficiency which was different from what the rest of the community understood.
- Once the difference in definition was understood, it led to the realization that the initial implementation of their pool and custom miner would cause a significant increase in stale shares for their users. FairUser and Geebus resolved this by giving users credit for stale shares even though they were stale.
- Crediting stale shares caused the pool to favor miners that have a high percentage of stale shares. Paying such miners for stale shares requires that they be subsidized by the stronger miners. FU and G decided that this measure would be temporary until they could fix the root cause of the stales.
- FU and G fixed the root cause of the increased number of stale shares with a new version of their poclbm-mod GPU miner which polls a local bitcoind process looking to see whether or not the block has changed. This wasn't the best way to solve the problem, but was mostly effective.
- The rest of the community was already working on a different way to solve server efficiency and stale shares by using Long Polling. Long Polling was released just a few days later and was found to be more effective, so FU and G added Long Polling support to their pool.
- Purely a statistical bug, but it caused some significant discussion; The stats webpage was pointing to the wrong block in Block Explorer, causing confusion for people trying to track down payments statistics.
- At this point, everything was pretty much stable and most of the concerning technical issues that negatively set them apart from other pools had been worked out.
- Then, one of the pool's users posted with concern about the fact that they were seeing severe (upwards of 40%!) fluctuations in the pool's hashing rate. And that the fluctuations seemed to correlate to miners "jumping ship" during long rounds. This is exactly the indicator that one would expect to see (though not proof) if the pool was being attacked by miners using Raulo's Pool Hopping exploit. This issue has not been resolved at this time.
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Technical issues are a fact of life and every single pool has had them and will continue to have them in the future. I do not begrudge any pool or pool operator for their technical issues and, in fact, I highly applaud pool operators for taking the work upon themselves and creating competition in the market!
I also do not begrudge a pool operator when he is unaware of or ignorant to technical issues and/or doesn't initially understand the reasoning behind them. None of us are perfect, and this is an extremely technical community that requires a lot of explanation.
I do, however, have major concerns whenever a pool operator is constantly attacking and hateful toward anyone that dares say anything at all except for thanks. Users that attempted to contribute their mining power to the pool but had small (sometimes ignorant) questions were often met with scorn and bile as if the operators despised everything about them. And every technical statement/question was met with skepticism, denial, obscenities, and hatred; as if the operators were lionesses trying to protect their cubs.
No matter what the technical or financial merits may be, these are not the kinds of people with which I trust to do business.
Edit: Added mention of the statistics error pointing to the wrong block.
