BitcoinPool.com open thread

[jgarzik]

Here's an unlocked thread, for discussion of BitcoinPool.com.

I believe in free and open discussion.  This thread will not be locked.

[grndzero]

Has anyone that's been at bitcoin pool for a while seen a better than average return vs a PPS pool?

I just built a mining box this past week that gets ~600Mh/s and want to know which place would give a better return.

It looks like I get about 0.32 BTC/hr at deepbit doing PPS, or roughly 230/mo. I like the steady payout even if it's 10% fee.

Of course I like the idea of no fees at bitcoinpool but my efficiency seems to vary a bit (80'ish-110) when leaving the client on 24/7 and 600Mh/s and is a small part of the growing total hash speed.

[bombo999]

I would recommend avoiding bitcoinpool.com

[LMGTFY]

I would recommend avoiding bitcoinpool.com

Actually, that's pretty much all you do. No explanation why, just a quick attack and sidle off. Care to change that, and provide some more detail this time? Otherwise it's difficult to escape the view that you're just trolling.

[bombo999]

It is my opinion based on experience, not an attack.  I am sorry if you share a different opinion.  That is why we have freedom of speech.

[LMGTFY]

It is my opinion based on experience, not an attack.  I am sorry if you share a different opinion.  That is why we have freedom of speech.

I have very little opinion on this pool, as I don't use it. I'm just curious as to why you have this opinion, and seem so keen to share it multiple times. I'd like you to elaborate. Rather than just saying "don't use this pool" I'd like you to say "don't use this pool because ..."

[bobR]

It is my opinion based on experience, not an attack.  I am sorry if you share a different opinion.  That is why we have freedom of speech.

Don't feed Troll's

Yes you are entitled to YOUR opinion
STOP shouting fire with out any reason WHY

Typical troll --- especially in a new thread

We know Your opinion ... Who Cares

[bombo999]

I do not believe I was shouting.  Sorry if my opinion offended you.

[LMGTFY]

I do not believe I was shouting.  Sorry if my opinion offended you.

Anything beyond opinion, pilgrim? Hell, for all we know you may have a well thought-out and rational reason, one we could all get on board with. Let's have it!

[JamezQ]

I do not believe I was shouting.  Sorry if my opinion offended you.

Your still not giving any reason why, thats what he was "offended" about in the first place, you should know that. You don't "have" to explain, but just know it's not your opinion that he is bothered by.

[grndzero]

I would recommend avoiding bitcoinpool.com

Recommendation ignored due to lack of reason, failure to address original question, and troll meter pegging loudly.

Anyone else?

[Inaba]

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.

[grndzero]

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.

I haven't seen and credible reasons to avoid them either.

I'm chalking it up to general devolution of the thread due to trolling, ignorance, arrogance, and ego. Par for the course of web boards all over the internet.

[bobR]

I'll see what happens over nite
for now since the eff rate went into effect
I'm getting more return with slush and his crapshoot for my cpu's
than here with my gpu

[xenon481]

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.

[bombo999]

I fully agree with your post.  Very well written.  I agree with you that one of the reasons for all of the hostility is because the pool owners quite often lash out with harsh language and obscenities.  They are also very quick to threaten expulsion from their pool for anyone who disagrees with them or dares post a negative opinion on the forums.  They also follow through on these threats, as I am aware of several users who have been banned from their pool for speaking up.  I also fully concur with your conclusion that these are not the type of individuals that I would trust or do business with either.

[goatpig]

The main source of drama and the primary draw back on BitcoinPool.com is around miners hopping out of the long blocks. FairUser and Geebus presented their pool as superior in 4 aspects:

1) Their miner, a modified version of poclbm, which main change is an askrate defined by your hash/s as opposed to the 1-10sec offered by the original poclbm. Their argument is that giving enough time to the miners (based on their respective hash rate) to complete the hashes they request will increase the efficiency of the pool and eventually decrease the blocks completion time at equivalent speed when compared to the other pools. The concept is certainly interesting, and the operators invited miners to come and compare their speed with stock poclbm vs the moded miner on their pool. This invitation is at the origin of MOST of the hoping on that pool imo.

2) They distributes rewards through a share based system. They point that alternative as the fairest way to pay out their miners. This was a direct criticism of slush's pool.

3) They display full stats, live, for everyone to see, as a proof of "fairness". This time they're going after Tycho's delayed stat.

4) They don't charge any fee, that they label as "forced donations".

Putting aside the fee issue, that I consider is a fair reward for the job done by the operators, the community confronted FairUser and Geebus with their declarations: As xenon481 said, the longer askrate implies more stale shares; on the long term score based systems payed the same reward per shares contributed as a shared based system; score system and stats delaying were counter measures against pool hoppers. Even though FairUser and Geebus' idea regarding askrate had its merits, exposing its weakness resulted in much drama.

Eventually the issue focused on BitcoinPool's vulnerability to Raulo's attack. FU and G indeed made a point of accusing slush of being dishonest and exploiting his pool and disadvantaging the slower miners with his score based system. Slush confronted them, explaining that the score base system was to protect against pool hopping. FU and G refused to aknowledge the validity of such attack, so slush offered to perform the attack (under his credentials) with his 3GH/s on BitcoinPool's 10~15 GH/s. FU and G turned down the offer, now accusing slush to try to attack their pool (implicitely admitting the attack is now possible and very real).

Geebus eventually admitted to personally despise slush, Tycho and slush were then accused of trolling BitcoinPool's thread and pool, and FairUser locked the thread after posting an already defeated argument as of why he'll stick to share based rewarding while exposing full live stats at the same time.

[FRanz33]

Ill weigh in here. Most of the above is true however towards the end they did actually accept slush's challenge right before it was locked out. Also much of the confusion in the thread came from members AND non-members adding nothing constructive to the conversation mostly complaining about long rounds even though the pool was doing fine for its hash rate. There was an awful lot of critisim going on, much more than any other pool and im sure that was frustrating for two pool operators who weren't making a mint off running it like Slush( No disrespect intended. When people even mention Bitcoinpool u imediately get people bashing without giving any good reason other than they dont like their attitude. But the best thing about the pool is its basically like setting up your own private pool and linking it with other people. if ur system crashes or u turn it off for the night u still get what u worked towards for that round and its really simple rules. Im sure i could go to slush or tychos pool and make the exact same but things would be slightly more complicated and i cant look at my stats page and say crap one of my units is down jus by getting on the net. You guys should still try the pool before bashing it despite what you think of Geebus & Fairuser

[grndzero]

FU and G refused to aknowledge the validity of such attack,

Mathematical proof is not real world proof, it is numbers making sense. I'm sure we would all like to see real world proof of this. The thread devolved into fights over simple definitions, terminology and hardheadedness between the math theory claiming the research to be irrefutable vs an actual test.

so slush offered to perform the attack (under his credentials) with his 3GH/s on BitcoinPool's 10~15 GH/s. FU and G turned down the offer, now accusing slush to try to attack their pool (implicitely admitting the attack is now possible and very real).

If I was a pool operator and another operator came into my thread and offered this up I would see it as hostile and be apprehensive also. He has his own pool. Even if is stats aren't constantly updated, anyone can calculate the sweet spot with some accuracy and try it out. There is no reason to repeatedly challenge another operator to exploiting their pool at the detriment of their users either way. That was adding fuel to the fire at a time when the whole conversation was going downhill.

[FairUser]

Ill weigh in here. Most of the above is true however towards the end they did actually accept slush's challenge right before it was locked out. Also much of the confusion in the thread came from members AND non-members adding nothing constructive to the conversation mostly complaining about long rounds even though the pool was doing fine for its hash rate. There was an awful lot of critisim going on, much more than any other pool and im sure that was frustrating for two pool operators who weren't making a mint off running it like Slush( No disrespect intended. When people even mention Bitcoinpool u imediately get people bashing without giving any good reason other than they dont like their attitude. But the best thing about the pool is its basically like setting up your own private pool and linking it with other people. if ur system crashes or u turn it off for the night u still get what u worked towards for that round and its really simple rules. Im sure i could go to slush or tychos pool and make the exact same but things would be slightly more complicated and i cant look at my stats page and say crap one of my units is down jus by getting on the net. You guys should still try the pool before bashing it despite what you think of Geebus & Fairuser

Thank you for your support FRanz33.  I locked the thread because of the trolling and flaming, and I think I made that clear once before.  A new forum on our site will be active in the next week. We feel this is necessary to help keep focus on our pool, efficiency, and how it affects mining.

Geebus did tell slush to go ahead and try it if he wanted, but we had a few conditions we would like met.

1) Tell everyone your handle. I'll even reserve "slush" just for him.
2) Tell everyone how long he plans on trying this.
3) Use our miner, poclbm-mod.  I don't want any more inefficient miners on the pool than necessary.
4) Report your stats somewhere on the forums every 24 hours so everyone can follow along.
5) Establish your baseline or average daily earnings using gribble, before, during, and after the test.

I think this is a perfectly fair and open challenge so long as he doesn't try and hide it from everyone. 

We are still waiting to hear his response...