Is Bitcoin about to be attacked?

[gmaxwell]

One of them is actually offering 115% PPS return!

On some of these services people are being paid 140-150% PPS, in fact.

Careful with suggesting anything, some of the operators of these services are known to put large bounties up to "uncover" evidence against people who ask sharply pointed questions.

[P4man]

My best guess is that its used for poolhopping. I recently looked at the stats of deepbit and found that ~10% of their hashrate is from hoppers, despite their anti hopping mechanisms:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=62975.0

There are many other proportional pools, most of them I think dont even take any measures against hoppers.

As for the things that concern me most about these schemes:
- GPUMax sells their miners hashing power to the highest bidder. There are legit uses for this, like pool ops testing their pool or kickstarting a new one, desperate to solve a long block etc, but at the end of the day, there is no telling who will buy it and how it will be used; if gpumax becomes big enough, in combination with DDoS,  51% attacks might one day become feasible and actually cheap.
- The other 100+% pps pools might contribute to this, possibly unknowingly. I think everyone agrees they redirect their hashing power elsewhere, wherever that is, without full disclosure and trust of the unknown recipient of their hashing power, there is no telling it doesnt end up with the some person also buying hashrate at GPUmax.
- Clipse has been lying about how he uses his hashpower. For a long time he insisted it was for some scheme to easier convert fiat in to bitcoins and be less reliant on exchanges (while in reality, in his scheme he would clearly become more reliant on exchanges since he would need to convert 15% more fiat money to btc). I notice he has finally changed his post now and removed the lies, but the fact he did doesnt not exactly fill me with confidence.

My position is that I will not rent out my hashing power without knowing exactly how its used. But exploitation of proportional pools is something I have less problems with. Someone is going to do that anyway, you have to be a retard to mine there (and not hop). IT would be good if we could somehow reach those miners and explain to them they are giving non trivial % of their revenue to hoppers, but in the end, its their own fault for not doing any reading. Id only object if pools proclaim to be hop proof when they are not.

[P4man]

Oh, I wanted to add something about p4man's claims about pool hopping at deepbit. I will say point blank I am not involved in this and I'm pretty damn sure GPUMAX is not either. 

Quote possible you didnt get around their anti hopping measures (looking at the stats, I dare say others did), but deepbit isnt the only proportional pool in town. It might be the only one trying to counter it.
For instance BitClockers seems to "enjoy" 6-700GH worth of hoppers for ~200GH of nonstop miners. Ouch!

http://bitclockers.com/statistics

That amount seems to line up fairly well with your quoted numbers:

ABC is 400G
I'm 200G
Clipse is 60G
GPUMAX is at least 120G how much more I don't know.

Interesting that you'd know those btw. ABC and CPUmax may advertise it, but Clipse doesnt afaik.

[P4man]

I just parsed bitclockers' last 98 blocks (I eliminated 2 blocks that had to be wrong, probably pool being offline) since December 29



Ouchie.

I also did the math.

An non stop miner that produces 100 shares per minute would actually have earned 195.8 BTC.
Average earnings, so what youd expect if there was no hopping would have been 215.5 BTC

TBH, the penalty wasnt quite as bad as I had thought, its still a ~10% penalty.  When I focus only on the last 50 blocks since mid January, that rises to a little over 12% the non stop miners there are giving to the hoppers..

Ill try to calculate hoppers' profits when I get back

[P4man]

Does the extra hashing power from the hoppers help to find blocks that the pool wouldn't have found otherwise

Of course. The amount of blocks found is proportional to the average hashrate.

evening the rewards out in the end?

Of course not. the hoppers benefit from the short blocks, while not suffering nearly as much from the long ones.

Its a zero sum game, if someone wins, someone else has to lose. Hoppers win, constant miners therefore lose in a proportional pool

I read something to this effect in a pool hopping thread and was curious as to your opinion. Is there some way to use your data to find out?

I already calculated the cost for non stop miners. On bitclockers they lose 10-12% compared to 100% PPS or hop proof pools.
Oh, I just checked, there is also a 2% fee on top of that lol! So they lose 12-14% compared to say, bitminter.

[P4man]

So someone paying 117% would by your math just lose money hoping?  I did not look into these number (photo wont load). Just asking.

No, you can not conclude that. And you should (and probably do) know that.
You have to take in to account the amount of shares submitted by hoppers compared to constant miners. A hopper could easily extract 150% profit while costing the combined constant miners "only" 10%. It purely depends on the ratio.
Moreover, hoppers can hop multiple pools.

[P4man]

150%? I think you might need to check your math

This has been discussed ad inifitum. Im not going to second guess people like Meni Rosenfeld on this.
Theoretically there is no upper limit to how much you can increase your profitability through hopping, and you could achieve over 200%  provided you have an infinite number of pools to hop. How much is possible in reality, taking in to account the hashrate and number of hoppable pools, stales, latency etc, well, Im not saying thats 150% but whatever it is, Im sure you would be in a better position to tell us.

[P4man]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that is right, but I doubt the 150% claim. Just like I doubted the 10% claim for deepbit. He did the math again and said the miners at deepbit were .2% lucky.

Of course those statements do not contradict each other.

I'm just trolling

QFT.

[P4man]

I just calculated the profit for poolhoppers on Bitclockers; assuming they jumped ship at 43% CDF, during my sample interval they would have achieved a payout per share thats 110% the expected payout and 121% the payout non stop miners got on that pool.

Hopping earlier, which requires more pools to hop, increased that slightly, but not by much.

Its worth noting, the more hoppers there are, the less those hoppers can benefit (if all miners are hoppers, they gain nothing); considering the enormous ratio hoppers/non hoppers on bitclockers, I suspect this is pretty much a worst case scenario. Ill try simulate deepbit later, assuming one could hop it, Im fairly certain it will be much closer to, if not over 150%.

[pirateat40]

Well I am 100% sure its not 100% hopping however I'm not sure where all the traffic goes for everyone.

However my point would be, if you do not want to be "stolen" from go to p2p or a pool like eclipsemc. I mine there myself. I find the payouts there to not be flawed like at the other large pools.

Thanks

You don't know where all the directed mining is going? I anxiously await your final release of what it is you (and others) are doing with all the mining power that can pay such a premium over other pools.

I have to say, you have been more courteous/respectful in this thread than the other “get rich quick” mining companies that have sprung up. I’m more inclined to believe that you are not doing something shady that will eventually be uncovered. I hope that if it’s “legit” it survives and flourishes.

You're right P2Pool is a great option and I respect the fact that you support it.

I just had to comment on this one.  If you even knew half of what you were talking about you would stop posting garbage like this.  If you don't trust the person/pool/proxy your mining with, then don't mine there.  The users of GPUMAX know exactly where their hashing power goes, cause they can purchase hashing power themselves.  We've spent more time ensuring our system can not be used to harm Bitcoin than anything else.  We all mine at pools to gain the advantage of more blocks.  So pool hopping or not, it's nothing new and it can't be stopped.  So stop whining about pools using their power to hop other pools. If you have a problem with them using your power to hop or attack Bitcoin then don't use them.

[P4man]

The users of GPUMAX know exactly where their hashing power goes

Yes (*), but he was talking about goat and clipse's proxies. anyone mining there definitely doesnt know what their hashing power is used for. I sometimes wonder if goat and clipse know themselves.

Anyway, had to add a *, because, I assume (?) proxy pools could also buy hashing power at gpu max? If so, the miner has again no clue where his hashes ultimately end up. But I havent checked out gpumax yet, so I could be wrong.

[pirateat40]

The users of GPUMAX know exactly where their hashing power goes

Yes (*), but he was talking about goat and clipse's proxies. anyone mining there definitely doesnt know what their hashing power is used for. I sometimes wonder if goat and clipse know themselves.

Anyway, had to add a *, because, I assume (?) proxy pools could also buy hashing power at gpu max? If so, the miner has again no clue where his hashes ultimately end up. But I havent checked out gpumax yet, so I could be wrong.

No, if our system detects a proxy pool (bithopper) it won't allow the purchase to start.  We also do research on unknown pools to verify if they are mining bitcoin blocks.  In reality most of the proxy pools can't handle the speeds we throw at them so they are blacklisted anyway.

[P4man]

No, if our system detects a proxy pool (bithopper) it won't allow the purchase to start.  We also do research on unknown pools to verify if they are mining bitcoin blocks.  In reality most of the proxy pools can't handle the speeds we throw at them so they are blacklisted anyway.

Thats certainly a lot better than those proxy pools, and I appreciate the effort, but there is only so much you can do; there is no telling if one day some "Lucky Sr" decides to take down some alt coin or attempt a double spend attack and buys hashing power at gpumax to complement his established pool's. Of course thats true for traditional pools as well, difference being that traditional pools at least have to earn trust to gather a sizable membership over a long period of time, whereas with gpumax, they can just buy it instantly.

Q: with GPUmax, do you as a miner have control over which buyers you allow to bid on your hashpower? So you can blacklist or whitelist specific pools?

BTW, semi off topic, but I notice bitminter is blacklisted by you due to high stales. AFAIK, that problem was solved 1 or 2 days ago. At least Im currently seeing only 0.1% stales since the new backend went live.

[pirateat40]

Q: with GPUmax, do you as a miner have control over which buyers you allow to bid on your hashpower? So you can blacklist or whitelist specific pools?

No, you simply set a PPS rate you're willing to sell your hashing power for and our system manages the rest.  If a purchase is over your PPS rate you do public work and if its less you mine at your private pool.

BTW, semi off topic, but I notice bitminter is blacklisted by you due to high stales. AFAIK, that problem was solved 1 or 2 days ago. At least Im currently seeing only 0.1% stales since the new backend went live.

We would be willing to do another test run on it to make sure its up to par.

[organofcorti]

I also did the math.

An non stop miner that produces 100 shares per minute would actually have earned 195.8 BTC.
Average earnings, so what youd expect if there was no hopping would have been 215.5 BTC

TBH, the penalty wasnt quite as bad as I had thought, its still a ~10% penalty.  When I focus only on the last 50 blocks since mid January, that rises to a little over 12% the non stop miners there are giving to the hoppers..

Ill try to calculate hoppers' profits when I get back

Can you show me your math? It's different to mine, and I'd like to see why your estimated miner earnings are so different to mine.