Join me in the biggest mining pool boycott Bitcoin has ever seen

[rjk]

The next massive DDOS attack (and it will happen) use that to convince people to try out p2pool.

Insider knowledge? Just kidding as usual

[1714023385]

1714023385

[slush]

The next massive DDOS attack (and it will happen) use that to convince people to try out p2poolmining over Tor.

...which have almost the same DDoS resistancy, still provide low variance mining, is easier to setup and chainless (you don't need to run bitcoind on miners and have them well connected).

[Raize]

I think many of you are unfairly targeting Tycho in this. I recommended he make some comments, but it's probably best if I make them here in his defense, myself.

Due to Deepbit's size, they really are at the mercy of the other miners and pools. If they support P2SH, and enough miners do not, their miners will be operating on a blockchain that is not democratic enough and prone to double-spends. If they do not support P2SH, and enough miners do, their miners will be operating on a blockchain that is not democratic enough and prone to double-spends. The decision has to lie with the rest of the pool, because any decision Tycho makes risks forking it.

I'd like to mention that I, personally, do not appreciate Tycho being put into this position, because this is asking him to represent the Deepbit miners as a whole, many of which may have a multitude of opinions, and the vast majority of which probably do not even specifically care either way, they just want to mine Bitcoin.

If future development decisions are going to be brought to the public for voting at the behest of any one developer, such as this one has, I would recommend Tycho ALWAYS cast his pool in favor of whichever developer makes the most effort to keep the issue OUT of the public sphere. I don't know who is to blame for this in this case, but developer hubris needs to be punished by miners and the Bitcoin public, not rewarded.

TL;DR - Deepbit is too big to weigh in on this issue individually and risk forking the chain. I'm also not happy this issue is public enough now that Tycho is obligated to address it.

Final note: I mine at a number of places, but Deepbit is not one of them.

[PatrickHarnett]

Read that - mix of sigh and lol.

I mine at deepbit, don't belong to a team (can't see any point - this isn't boinc) and I don't particularly care about the mining programs or squeezing every last bit cent from my GPUs or software.  Last time I went to the deepbit site I didn't care to look at any voting stuff (if there is any) - but it tells me my hash speed and earnings.

[Hexadecibel]

I mine at deepbit, don't belong to a team (can't see any point - this isn't boinc) and I don't particularly care about the mining programs or squeezing every last bit cent from my GPUs or software. Last time I went to the deepbit site I didn't care to look at any voting stuff (if there is any) - but it tells me my hash speed and earnings.

Perhaps you should take more interest in these issues then. The health of this decentralized network is important, and indeed it will affect you.

[PatrickHarnett]

I mine at deepbit, don't belong to a team (can't see any point - this isn't boinc) and I don't particularly care about the mining programs or squeezing every last bit cent from my GPUs or software. Last time I went to the deepbit site I didn't care to look at any voting stuff (if there is any) - but it tells me my hash speed and earnings.

Perhaps you should take more interest in these issues then. The health of this decentralized network is important, and indeed it will affect you.

I have actually read a great deal on this issue, both the BIP changes, the issues the dev team is having, and the issue of centralisation.  Yes it will affect me while I am using bitcoin actively, but the detail and materiality may not.

I also find it unusual to receive pm's telling me I shouldn't mine on Deepbit, and the degree of "evil" associated with it.

So, I am at a pool that has 30% (it was higher), it meets my needs, and has someone who has a service that has attracted a lot of business.  However, there might be more centralisation in the dev team, but people are not dismantling that with such gusto.

[Fiyasko]

what the F**K is p2sh...
Im using P2Pool
And im using Deepbit.

Leave me alone im being a goodboy, I shall bake bread for your flame war, And then make one side pay more than the other for it.

[AniceInovation]

Two points i think are crucial:

1) Gavin and the other devs should and will come to an agreement. No one else should stick their nose on that.
2) All pool admins will support what they decide.

The first point assumes that they, over all the others conoiceurs, have weighted pros and cons of each implementation, and decided on a solution. They have proven until today that they do the best they can, and everyone should support them, for the better and the worst.
The second point is, i assume and always assumed the main pool admins do what the developers decide.

As long as those are true, i see no point for the alarmist.

[Transisto]

Count me in.

[Prattler]

Everyone who cares for bitcoin's success, should solo mine or mine on p2pool, follow development and vote with their bitcoin clients (hashing power).

Weakening the security of your own money is stupid!

[Kohta]

I gave P2Pool a try for 2 or 3 days and i got nothing from any payout, i am a simple thinker, i mine at deepbit because i can see my mining making progress.

I used CGMiner and some other program to connect to the pool and it was just a flay of "waiting for work" i used up 3 days of 3000 Mhash/s and went into the negatives, that's what turned me off, it added some address to my other wallets receiving but nothing ever came from that.

Besides that i'm am one of the type of people who would like to see Bitcoins succeed and become a currency we can one day trade with Newegg or Amazon as an online currency, but it is a vicious cycle which can be summed to an analogy for my personal situation.

Where mining is your job, and ways of mining are your transportation.

I see solo mining like walking to work, you will show up late every time and eventually be out of a job.
I see P2pool as public transportation that i have to wait an extensive amount of time for and still end up being late.
I see deepbit as using the car i own, the gas i fill it with is getting me to work bringing me ahead to one day be able to either invest in more bitcoins or faster transportation.

Maybe 3000Mhash/s isn't much to some of you, but that's all i have and for me (someone who assumes is on the low-end of the hash spectrum) this is the only way i don't go backwards, These cards cost roughly $165 by themselves per month to run, that's not including hot water, cooking meals or anything else in daily life, it isn't feasible for me to dedicate my rigs to a pool that i can't make up the difference from atleast breaking even.

someone told me it was due to a string of bad luck, following longer it turned into someone having some fishy activity and getting paid every 40 minutes. If i'm not working, i'm with my daughter and i have to have a place where i can set up and mine without worrying if i'm breaking even, that's my reason for staying with Tycho, so far he hasn't done anything that i can see to hurt me or anybody else, just reading these forums and the "P2pool mission" it sounds like you guys want to run "Wal-Mart" out of business because they carry a little bit of everything, while i happen to like being able to get my DVD's and TV dinners in the same place.

[Fiyasko]

-Snip-

Your entire post can be boiled down to "variance scares me". And over time, a pool where you pay a fee will earn you less than a pool where you don't.

I understand, of course, but you are simply rationalizing your fears.

Also, the argument is that "wal-mart" may be great, but if it fails, it brings the entire town down with it. Where as smaller stores not only are much less likely to impact the community if they fail, shopping at them actually provides extra job security to everyone.

Chea, Just listen to holliday, I was on P2Pool for.... 30mins? Found nothing, Turned it back on for 1hr, Got 4shares, For a total of about .02btc
600mh/sec two 6870's


Hey guys, I've got P2Pool running on my gaming desktop, And i want to point my 24/7 miner at it's P2Pool port... Thing...
So that im detected as one entity with 1.6ghash rather than two entities one with 600 the other with 1000.
I tried to do this with Solo minining and gave up, Granted i didnt put much work into it... Perhaps i should check around in the P2Pool thread

[Kohta]

I think if there was an easier way to set up it might grab more attention, you know, graphs, some sort of BTC/24hr, or more importantly a unified miner, it took me a couple of hours just to set up the miner/pool hasher following a guide, and i still don't even know how to open the bitcoin wallet as a RPC server without doing it with GUIMiner in Windows.

I haven't been a part of BTC Mining for very long i will admit that, i was around when BTC went from $20 to $0.50, i still have that feeling like if i don't get ahead, i won't. If i don't rationalize, as you put it, there is no way i will come out ahead. As human beings we are developed around being rational to survive and i think until i come alittle closer to finishing the payments on these mining rigs i won't be to comfortable taking the risk. I'll never work against a pool or anybody efforts to mine, i keep my opinions pretty neutral and decide what i have to do to "survive" for my situation. 

[Kohta]

Yeah, for several days it was under $1, i remember checking it constantly on Mtgox.

This is what happened my first time around, i invested about $2500 in 5970's, and already had 2 before i began, i heard about bitcoins if only because i had been searching around for 5970 info and bitcoin poped up, but anyway, if you look at this chart i began around the middle of July, within a few days of browsing these forums i found out that it would be profitable in the long run - unfortunately i couldn't see the future, well about a week later that dip happened, right around the time it hit $2/coin i had sold all my 5970's and i lost my ass, i paid $699 a piece for them and by that point i was strapped for cash you can imagine how many other people were also selling of their equipment at the same time and because of the deflation, it took me at least a month to sell it all and i ended up selling them for around $350 shipped. That was a massive hit, i didn't even make enough BTC to pay the week and couple days of energy those 5970's used.

That's where alot of my fear comes from, iv'e re-invested in BTC again in more than one way-

If i could i'd make a neat little GUI that connected both CGMiner and P2pool with optional kernals and what-not but i pulled my hair out trying to make a G15 applet that accepted the API key, i wasn't able to complete it, i'm just not brain enough for that.

[SgtSpike]

I think if there was an easier way to set up it might grab more attention, you know, graphs, some sort of BTC/24hr, or more importantly a unified miner, it took me a couple of hours just to set up the miner/pool hasher following a guide, and i still don't even know how to open the bitcoin wallet as a RPC server without doing it with GUIMiner in Windows.

This.

I haven't even bothered to try and set up p2pool just because I don't need yet another thing to mess with and steal a few hours of my life.  Give me something that is as easy to use as double-clicking, and I'll use it.  Otherwise, I'm just not going to bother.

[Fiyasko]

Well think of it this way, To mine on deepbit, It'll take you... Five.. too eight minutes to fully compleat?
Goto site->Download guiminer->Pick Deepbit->Register at deepbit->Point miner & add flags, done.
(from what i can remember) for P2Pool
Goto P2Pool thread in forum->Download Python,Twisted,P2Pool,CGminer->Configure P2Pool,Bitcoind and CGminer aiming, Done.

Difference? One is a minized tray icon that is "incognito" while the other is three minimized cmd windows on the task bar.
Sadly, It took me 2hrs to configure P2Pool.

[Fiyasko]

Well think of it this way, To mine on deepbit, It'll take you... Five.. too eight minutes to fully compleat?
Goto site->Download guiminer->Pick Deepbit->Register at deepbit->Point miner & add flags, done.
(from what i can remember) for P2Pool
Goto P2Pool thread in forum->Download Python,Twisted,P2Pool,CGminer->Configure P2Pool,Bitcoind and CGminer aiming, Done.

Difference? One is a minized tray icon that is "incognito" while the other is three minimized cmd windows on the task bar.
Sadly, It took me 2hrs to configure P2Pool.

I never downloaded Python or Twisted to run P2Pool. What do you use these for?

*fucking jaw drop* I Could Not run it without Twisted and Python (python i understand why it could be needed, But wtf is twisted?)
Python is needed for the scripts.... Dah fack.... I was getting errors without it (and i had to reinstall it too!, i already had python, Yes i used it, It was working)
Twisted<-I have no Fucking idea, But i got Pages of different repeating errors without it installed
(No, I did not use/build from the source of P2Pool)

Now i wish i took a screeny of the errors..

[rjk]

Well think of it this way, To mine on deepbit, It'll take you... Five.. too eight minutes to fully compleat?
Goto site->Download guiminer->Pick Deepbit->Register at deepbit->Point miner & add flags, done.
(from what i can remember) for P2Pool
Goto P2Pool thread in forum->Download Python,Twisted,P2Pool,CGminer->Configure P2Pool,Bitcoind and CGminer aiming, Done.

Difference? One is a minized tray icon that is "incognito" while the other is three minimized cmd windows on the task bar.
Sadly, It took me 2hrs to configure P2Pool.

I never downloaded Python or Twisted to run P2Pool. What do you use these for?

*fucking jaw drop*
Python is needed for the scripts.... Dah fack.... I was getting errors without it (and i had to reinstall it too!, i already had python, Yes i used it, It was working)
Twisted<-I have no Fucking idea, But i got Pages of different repeating errors without it installed
(No, I did not use/build from the source of P2Pool)

Now i wish i took a screeny of the errors..

Dunno man. No errors here and I never installed either of those.

On windows, the compiled executable does not need python, twisted, etc. If you are using the uncompiled .py script, you will need python, twisted, etc on windows or linux.

[BlackBeardie]

Now is the time to start thinking about the future of Bitcoin. We're currently in a situation where the developers of Bitcoin are attempting to enable a new feature called multisig which is a massive technological improvement to the Bitcoin protocol.



For the developers to be able to safely go forward with these changes they need 55% of the processing power in the network and Deepbit holds more than 30%. It's important to understand that this issue is undermining the whole idea behind Bitcoin. This massive centralization is a threat to all future development of Bitcoin. It's not about 51% attacks anymore, this is much more significant. One pool operator, namely Tycho, holds all the cards as far as any major development of the Bitcoin protocol is concerned.


For more information on this I recommend these following threads. Read what P2SH is about. Move to a smaller pool and consult your mining pool operator on what he thinks about the multisig implementations. The other option is to move to p2pool and vote for yourself, directly. Or at least pressure your current pool operator to offer different servers for different votes so you have a choice.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=61125.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=60829.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=60981.0

Hi Technomage,

I am a BitCoin novice user and only started micro mining a couple of weeks ago. But what you say is very sound. Facts and the true are always clear but some people try to hide from the majority or obfuscate them for their own selfish ends.

The bottom line is that if there are only a few large mining pools, these operators can hold us to blackmail and as you say, make the decisions on the development of the BitCoin protocol to suit their own ends.
Thank you for raising awareness on this vital issue. I think the long there danger of creating a few big mining pools doesn't ever appear on most small time miner's radars. They go with what is easy and what their friends have done. It's not feasible for me to implement P2SH mining at this time as I have under 10 GH/s processing power. I think I read the minimum recommended hashing power for implementing P2SH is 40 GH/s

Keep up the good work!

Best wishes,
Zephyr

[zimmah]

Why isn't P2Pool dominating yet?

from one of the comments:

Some of p2pool's suggested advantages are a bit exaggerated. The recent P2SH woes are a non-issue since miners who want to vote can simply go to a pool that votes as they want. The more generic concentration of power problem can alternatively be solved with smart miners (miners who generate blocks themselves or from an independent party, and submit shares with Merkle branches of the generation transaction which are accepted if it credits the pool).

Because of these reasons, I believe the future will be small PPS pools which act as a proxy to p2pool (with or without the use of independent block-issuing nodes). These will have low fees, no variance, as many features as the pool operator wants to implement, and will not be highly centralized. Until we see more of these I don't think there's much justification for p2pool going mainstream.

is this possible? That would be interesting. that way i can benefit from all the features of Ghash without giving them my power to vote/doublespend. In fact, everyone should do this, so they can vote individually and prevent doublespending, while still enjoying the benefits of your favorite pool.