P2POOL vs. Pooled Mining - something stinks here

[Gabi]

I want to say that p2pool does not require trust like with a normal pool: no one can cheat or steal your btc or scam you with p2pool

With a normal pool they can (and they do indeed...)

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[eviltt]

If you can't handle variance, mine at a big pool! Simple problem, simple fix.

You call getting 1/2 of the reward I should get - over a period of almost 3 weeks - variance? You can't be serious ...

first thing is first.. half.. dude learn to do math.. 1.1 /2 is .55 not .7.

you sound like a tool when you cant even do simple math properly

[Frizz23]

If you can't handle variance, mine at a big pool! Simple problem, simple fix.

You call getting 1/2 of the reward I should get - over a period of almost 3 weeks - variance? You can't be serious ...

first thing is first.. half.. dude learn to do math.. 1.1 /2 is .55 not .7.

you sound like a tool when you cant even do simple math properly

 

We already had this here.

[eviltt]

If you can't handle variance, mine at a big pool! Simple problem, simple fix.

You call getting 1/2 of the reward I should get - over a period of almost 3 weeks - variance? You can't be serious ...

first thing is first.. half.. dude learn to do math.. 1.1 /2 is .55 not .7.

you sound like a tool when you cant even do simple math properly

 

We already had this here.

maybe but something is fishy about someone who wants to claim things are 16+% worse than they really are.. i mean 16% is a lot to get wrong.. or conveniently leave out isnt it?

how would you like it if your employer just forgot to pay you 16% of your pay check? or the cashier forgot to pay you 16% of your change..

just goes to a point that this was a sensational attempt to scare people away from p2pool

[Frizz23]

get a life dude ...

[eviltt]

get a life dude ...

fail person is fail...

learn to do math properly

[casascius]

What happens if someone threw a lot of hashing power at p2pool but withheld the winning shares?  Example, a rogue mining pool op who wants to disrupt p2pool, who would value the disruption more than the winning blocks. He would still make most of the income from everyone else who didn't discard blocks.  People would notice underperformance and couldn't do anything about it not could they prove it was even occurring.

[eleuthria]

What happens if someone threw a lot of hashing power at p2pool but withheld the winning shares?  Example, a rogue mining pool op who wants to disrupt p2pool, who would value the disruption more than the winning blocks. He would still make most of the income from everyone else who didn't discard blocks.  People would notice underperformance and couldn't do anything about it not could they prove it was even occurring.

Same thing that happens on every pool.  The blocks would get found at the rate of (Pool hash rate - Malicious User).  Everybody's earnings drop equal to Malicious User's percentage of overall pool power.

From the legit miner perspective, the only payment method fully immune to this is PPS (but the PPS pool owner gets screwed), unless the attack bankrupts the pool.

SMPPS is also guarded against this in part, but the attack would hurt other users if the attack ran the buffer deep into negatives.  If the SMPPS pool uses a proportional method to handle backpay during a negative buffer, the attack would stop affecting SMPPS once the attacker leaves, though the pool would still take a while to FULLY recover, and any miners that left during the attack due to the backpay issues may not recover from the losses.

[Gabi]

Withhelding winning shares is pointless, they can't be used to make blocks or whatelse.

Disruption? Nothing would change. Each p2pool user run it's own p2pool client, there aren't servers that can be overloaded or whatelse.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Withhelding winning shares is pointless, they can't be used to make blocks or whatelse.

Disruption? Nothing would change. Each p2pool user run it's own p2pool client, there aren't servers that can be overloaded or whatelse.

Well not pointless.  It is a potential economic attack.  Say a major pool saw p2pool as a threat.  They could dump significant hashpower at the pool and withhold blocks.  This would make p2pool seems "continually unlucky" and if the unlucky streak continued enough less savy users would start to doubt the protocol and possibly return to conventional pools.

I doubt any pool is doing this and p2pool isn't special, they could do the same thing to any small conventional pool.  The good news is that as p2pool gets larger the "cost" to have any meaningful affect of reward also grows.

[kjj]

Withhelding winning shares is pointless, they can't be used to make blocks or whatelse.

Disruption? Nothing would change. Each p2pool user run it's own p2pool client, there aren't servers that can be overloaded or whatelse.

Well not pointless.  It is a potential economic attack.  Say a major pool saw p2pool as a threat.  They could dump significant hashpower at the pool and withhold blocks.  This would make p2pool seems "continually unlucky" and if the unlucky streak continued enough less savy users would start to doubt the protocol and possibly return to conventional pools.

I doubt any pool is doing this and p2pool isn't special, they could do the same thing to any small conventional pool.  The good news is that as p2pool gets larger the "cost" to have any meaningful affect of reward also grows.

Of course, this would also make the attacking pool look pretty unlucky too...

[flower1024]

Withhelding winning shares is pointless, they can't be used to make blocks or whatelse.

Disruption? Nothing would change. Each p2pool user run it's own p2pool client, there aren't servers that can be overloaded or whatelse.

Well not pointless.  It is a potential economic attack.  Say a major pool saw p2pool as a threat.  They could dump significant hashpower at the pool and withhold blocks.  This would make p2pool seems "continually unlucky" and if the unlucky streak continued enough less savy users would start to doubt the protocol and possibly return to conventional pools.

I doubt any pool is doing this and p2pool isn't special, they could do the same thing to any small conventional pool.  The good news is that as p2pool gets larger the "cost" to have any meaningful affect of reward also grows.

if a pool uses the hashing power from its miners its detectable.
every miner who found a block should check if his pool shows it.. if not -> he may be cheated...

but i guess that there are not many miners out there who do this regulary. so its not a big risk for the pool itself.

[DeathAndTaxes]

if a pool uses the hashing power from its miners its detectable.
every miner who found a block should check if his pool shows it.. if not -> he may be cheated...

but i guess that there are not many miners out there who do this regulary. so its not a big risk for the pool itself.

Attacker wouldn't need to use know hashing power.  They could simply rent some from say GPU-Max or a private farm.  If attacker made up 20% of the pool then they would reduce the revenue 20% below PPS.

Hypothetically p2pool ~150GH/s, to reduce revenue 20% would require 30GH/s of withheld blocks.  It would cost attacker ~$850 per week gross but they would get paid back 80% making the net cost ~$170 per week.  

Of course I would point out:
a) as p2pool gets bigger the cost of any meaningful attack also rises.
b) this isn't limited to just p2pool any individual could perform this economic attack against any other pool.

[gmaxwell]

Of course, this would also make the attacking pool look pretty unlucky too...

No it wouldn't—  they only have to pay out of pockets their reduction in the victim pool's return. They can claim to be as lucky as they like, presuming they are hiding the identity of their blocks.

But P2Pool is resistant here, both because the block bonus makes it even more unprofitable to withhold, but also because the real justification for refusing to use a habitually unlucky pool, that it might be an indicator of an operator who is skimming, just doesn't apply.

if a pool uses the hashing power from its miners its detectable.
every miner who found a block should check if his pool shows it.. if not -> he may be cheated...
but i guess that there are not many miners out there who do this regulary. so its not a big risk for the pool itself.

Pretty much no one does this, IIRC none of the miners facilitate doing this in a way that would make it easy (e.g. provide a separate log file of found block). And now with all these non-public pools operating that give >100% reward it's hard to simply audit pools because they're not generally accessible.

(in light of the recent lucky run, I changed the threads subject )

[kano]

...

if a pool uses the hashing power from its miners its detectable.
every miner who found a block should check if his pool shows it.. if not -> he may be cheated...
but i guess that there are not many miners out there who do this regulary. so its not a big risk for the pool itself.

Pretty much no one does this, IIRC none of the miners facilitate doing this in a way that would make it easy (e.g. provide a separate log file of found block). And now with all these non-public pools operating that give >100% reward it's hard to simply audit pools because they're not generally accessible.

(in light of the recent lucky run, I changed the threads subject )

cgminer reports at the end the number of found blocks (and also reports each found block when it happens)
I guess it's possible no one uses the "2> logfile" (and "grep BLOCK logfile")
I look at that all the time (coz I wrote the block detection) but yeah I guess maybe no one else does?

[Graet]

http://blockchain.info/ makes it a bit hard to hide blocks. Pools are under constant scrutiny and this is just one tool.
heh onetime we misreported a block number for a block we had found due to tz and software glitch, within minutes someone joined our IRC yelling at me for "claiming" another pools block...when I mined on other pools I kept an eye on blocks and stuff and expected no less of miners on my pool...

I wonder how many of the "pools are evil" people have actually spoken to a poolop about thier motivation. In the 8+ months i have been running a pool less than a handful of miners have actually asked me... seen plenty of FUD and misguided opinion written tho...

Headsup: I was and still am a miner, I started  pool as I was unhappy with the experience I was getting at the pools of the time and wanted to offer something better to miners(I will freely admit I have not always succeeded- won't stop me trying though). At that time I could see the dominance of the major pools as others could and still do. I saw and still do see the value of a bunch of medium sized pools, my goal has always to be one Some of the other poolops i have spoken to had the same motivation.

I can also see the advantages of p2pool to bitcoin, I dont think it invalidates pools though, it is another useful tool in the development of Bitcoin, just as pools have been.

Might I humbly suggest some of the keyboard warriors out there step back, take a deep breath, actually talk to some poolops about why they are doing this before making up more stories - or if you have facts publish them. All the rumor, innuendo and just plain crap isnt helping Bitcoin one bit.

I mean Bitcoin IS why we are all here isnt it?

best
Graeme

[DeathAndTaxes]

http://blockchain.info/ makes it a bit hard to hide blocks.

28% of blocks are unknown. 

Might I humbly suggest some of the keyboard warriors out there step back, take a deep breath, actually talk to some poolops about why they are doing this before making up more stories - or if you have facts publish them. All the rumor, innuendo and just plain crap isnt helping Bitcoin one bit.

What are you talking about?

[gmaxwell]

I wonder how many of the "pools are evil" people have actually spoken to a poolop about thier motivation. In the 8+ months i have been running a pool less than a handful of miners have actually asked me... seen plenty of FUD and misguided opinion written tho...

You're being far too sensitive here, I think.

There has been a ton of fraud in bitcoin services— plenty of people taking whatever coin they can get and running. You can now trivially purchase hashing power on demand.  Pools have been _regularly_ attacked with overt attacks, Eligius is being hit with 20GBit/sec as we speak. The solidcoin people run a pool with the explicit goal of 'taking out bitcoin', complete with graphics that look like they were made by a 14 year old wannabe mob boss. People can now purchase large amounts of hash power at a small premium via services like gpumax.

And, no— there isn't an abundance of hard evidence, part of the reason that pool oriented attacks are concerning is because there simply wouldn't be an abundance of evidence. Blockchain.info's identification is crap except for the few well tagged pools that they identify and can easily be obscured by anyone who wants to try to do so.  Certainly the fact that operators continue to deploy proportional pools that get their non-hopping customers ripped off doesn't bode well for their diligence even if they aren't ever actually malevolent.

Basically it comes down to trust: Do miners trust the pool operators to not attack Bitcoin or other pools, do they trust them to keep their setups correctly running, do they trust them to adopt and correctly implement fair payment schemes, do they trust them to not hand them the dirty proceeds of laundering instead of fresh coins,  do they trust them not to pad the share counts or 'lose' shares, or to simply run off with the miners funds?

Often that trust is justified— it certainly seems to to be in your case. But even so, Bitcoin was created for the explicit purpose of reducing the points of trust we needed to have in our currency system.  Please don't take it personally when people point out the potential weaknesses of all the avoidable trust pooling can add back to the system.

[Frizz23]

When money is involved, trust is the last thing you want to rely on.

Money is Trust.

Remember the text that once was written on US-Dollar bills? "Will pay to the bearer on demand xxx dollars". Once people don't trust this promise any more a dollar is nothing more than a piece of green paper.

Again: Money = Trust

[Frizz23]

... trust that the FED won't create trillions upon trillions upon trillions of dollars ...

But they did. And still do.

Basically the US is even more fu**ed than Greece. Unfortunately the Greeks don't have aircraft carriers ...