Wow, that's actually interesting. So this is to prevent miners purposefully trying to attack a pool?
I don't think said pool thinks those miners will do it on purpose, but that doesn't change the fact that any firmware that isn't capable of finding blocks will cause a loss to everyone involved, however, there are some accusations against Slush pool on the past when they had a streak of bad luck which did not seem "normal", some people accused them for running un-tested firmware that was contributing only to the hashrate for payouts but found no blocks at all, the accusations goes beyond that for some people, they claim that Slush "realized" that mistake later, secretly fixed the bug and hidden the truth because the loss was too large for them to compensate.
Of course, since this whole game is all about luck, just because it's unlikely to have say 80% luck for x period of time - if that happens - it's not solid proof that you can take to the court, however, for anyone who understands the statistics of mining knows that chances of having an 80% luck for 200+ blocks are slim to nothing, so I do believe that Slush had indeed lost nearly 1.5k
BTC as a result of a lousy firmware version.
Do you know how exactly they check firmware integrity?
I really don't, at least I am not sure so I won't be throwing guesses at the wall to impress anyone
, in fact, one of the devs who work within the team of the most famous custom firmware out there told me he doesn't know how the pool does that!!, besides, the pool operator probably won't reveal how they detect those miners or else it would be easily bypassed.
