[Resolved] A1BitcoinPool Complaint

[Clipse]

I was pondering over being the thread hero and reimbursing those who lost coins, guess I took too long to put on my cape :/

There are probably some people that haven't yet explained they were scammed, I would recommend that we let the guys that compile the info determine how they are going to do the reimbursements.

The biggest problem right now is that its wide open for anyone who didnt even mine to claim they need payment, so its possibly a scam turning into another scam.

[legolouman]

I was pondering over being the thread hero and reimbursing those who lost coins, guess I took too long to put on my cape :/

There are probably some people that haven't yet explained they were scammed, I would recommend that we let the guys that compile the info determine how they are going to do the reimbursements.

The biggest problem right now is that its wide open for anyone who didnt even mine to claim they need payment, so its possibly a scam turning into another scam.

I've created a new thread to help with this confusion.

Everyone, please come and post in this thread

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=66387.0

[Maged]

For the purposes of removing the scammer tag, Raize just bought up to 37 BTC of A1BitcoinPool's debt. A1BitcoinPool, if you would like to settle this, you may now communicate with Raize. If you two come to a settlement, we can remove the scammer tag. If Raize doesn't cooperate, sending him 37 BTC will also count as a full and final settlement.

[pirateat40]

For the purposes of removing the scammer tag, Raize just bought up to 37 BTC of A1BitcoinPool's debt. A1BitcoinPool, if you would like to settle this, you may now communicate with Raize. If you two come to a settlement, we can remove the scammer tag. If Raize doesn't cooperate, sending him 37 BTC will also count as a full and final settlement.

In true debt collection fashion, A1BitcoinPool would need to pay a little more to Raize to clear is name.  Agreed?

[Starlightbreaker]

30% for "covering-your-ass fee" is a pretty good amount. 

[legolouman]

Just want to let you guys know, that A1B is being quite helpful in helping resolve any issues I'm finding with who is owed what.

[Maged]

For the purposes of removing the scammer tag, Raize just bought up to 37 BTC of A1BitcoinPool's debt. A1BitcoinPool, if you would like to settle this, you may now communicate with Raize. If you two come to a settlement, we can remove the scammer tag. If Raize doesn't cooperate, sending him 37 BTC will also count as a full and final settlement.

In true debt collection fashion, A1BitcoinPool would need to pay a little more to Raize to clear is name.  Agreed?

Nope. If this was true debt collection, Raize would have bought the debt from each person for less than 3.7 BTC total.

Also, doing that would be bad precedent. If anyone is accused of being a scammer, someone else could just come in, pay everyone what the scammer owes them, and demand more money from the scammer - all without making an agreement with anyone.

[pirateat40]

For the purposes of removing the scammer tag, Raize just bought up to 37 BTC of A1BitcoinPool's debt. A1BitcoinPool, if you would like to settle this, you may now communicate with Raize. If you two come to a settlement, we can remove the scammer tag. If Raize doesn't cooperate, sending him 37 BTC will also count as a full and final settlement.

In true debt collection fashion, A1BitcoinPool would need to pay a little more to Raize to clear is name.  Agreed?

Nope. If this was true debt collection, Raize would have bought the debt from each person for less than 3.7 BTC total.

Also, doing that would be bad precedent. If anyone is accused of being a scammer, someone else could just come in, pay everyone what the scammer owes them, and demand more money from the scammer - all without making an agreement with anyone.

Right but on the flip side, I could jump ship (no pun), let someone cover the debt for me, pay them the original amount in a month or more and restore my title.  Seems like a mess waiting to happen to me. 

[Clipse]

I think these scams/problems/hacks you name it, just shows how long btc still have to go for human stability ignoring the market prices.

[Maged]

For the purposes of removing the scammer tag, Raize just bought up to 37 BTC of A1BitcoinPool's debt. A1BitcoinPool, if you would like to settle this, you may now communicate with Raize. If you two come to a settlement, we can remove the scammer tag. If Raize doesn't cooperate, sending him 37 BTC will also count as a full and final settlement.

In true debt collection fashion, A1BitcoinPool would need to pay a little more to Raize to clear is name.  Agreed?

Nope. If this was true debt collection, Raize would have bought the debt from each person for less than 3.7 BTC total.

Also, doing that would be bad precedent. If anyone is accused of being a scammer, someone else could just come in, pay everyone what the scammer owes them, and demand more money from the scammer - all without making an agreement with anyone.

Right but on the flip side, I could jump ship (no pun), let someone cover the debt for me, pay them the original amount in a month or more and restore my title.  Seems like a mess waiting to happen to me. 

I agree, but it's our current policy based on precedent (see: terrytibbs). If you have any idea of how it could be handled differently, please be sure to bring it up in Meta.

My offer to remove the tag is for a limited time only. Let's just say one week from now. After that, we might still do it, but it'll depend on our policy at the time as well as individual factors.

Also, as of now, 38.0094954 BTC has been claimed, so, A1BitcoinPool is liable for 1.0094954 BTC in addition to the 37 BTC from Raize. Of course, A1BitcoinPool may dispute these claims.

[kano]

So - the 2 Prop blocks were paid out to everyone who Prop mined?

[Inaba]

I'm in for prop payments!

[someone703]

So - the 2 Prop blocks were paid out to everyone who Prop mined?

Nope, someone else stepped in and paid on his behalf so there's a smaller lump sum to pay out to all those who lost out in some way apparently.

[Raize]

I have three primary reasons for doing this:

1) To advertise for P2Pool, where I presently do most of my mining.
2) To warn new miners who browse these forums and get them to reconsider joining smaller pools and pools that offer weird payout mechanisms or ridiculous PPS rates.
3) Solving a curiosity of mine with regards to how many people get scammed and remain quiet about it on behalf of the scammer, hoping to work out a deal where they can quietly get paid. I might actually write an article about it sometime. I think a great deal of people are quiet about being scammed when they shouldn't be.

[kano]

I have three primary reasons for doing this:

1) To advertise for P2Pool, where I presently do most of my mining.
2) To warn new miners who browse these forums and get them to reconsider joining smaller pools and pools that offer weird payout mechanisms or ridiculous PPS rates.
3) Solving a curiosity of mine with regards to how many people get scammed and remain quiet about it on behalf of the scammer, hoping to work out a deal where they can quietly get paid. I might actually write an article about it sometime. I think a great deal of people are quiet about being scammed when they shouldn't be.

Ignoring 3) ...

P2Pool would die if everyone switched to it - the current code probably cannot handle 1TH - but it would certainly kill off every small miner around

The person who ran this pool was already known to be a pool failure yet people mined it - the failure here was that information being ignored, not that it was non-p2pool.

I do find this regular "Normal pools are evil go to P2Pool" rather annoying actually - since that would (as mentioned above) kill Bitcoin also if all the non-p2pools shut down.
I still will not mine on P2Pool due to this attempted scare tactics being used sometimes in this forum.

[jake262144]

I still will not mine on P2Pool due to this attempted scare tactics being used sometimes in this forum.

Do you know that mining on p2pool requires no trust whatsoever as to what the pool op might be doing with your hash rate behind your back.
You're running your own bitcoind what makes you the pool op as far as share/block generation is concerned.
The only part still requiring a degree of trust is splitting the block reward fairly.
You do see the benefits, right?

I do agree that we're better off with many competing miner-smart pools instead of one ginormous p2pool.
The old (miner-dumb) model should eventually die out, just as proportional payout scheme seems to be doing now.
Scare tactics - let's just call it aggressive marketing, ok Kano the Unyielding?

[Maged]

I would also like a solution to this and will pay a large amount for it.

Oh, really? Has anyone suggested making more than one P2Pool? The splitting could all be handled in the same software, so they don't need to compete with each other for users. A split would hurt variance, but if you make it only happen when the pool reaches the edge of how far it can scale, the variance loss shouldn't be all that bad. A neat side-effect of this: the more times you split, the less variance you lose, since the software should automatically re-balance each instance.

[DeathAndTaxes]

I do find this regular "Normal pools are evil go to P2Pool" rather annoying actually - since that would (as mentioned above) kill Bitcoin also if all the non-p2pools shut down.
I still will not mine on P2Pool due to this attempted scare tactics being used sometimes in this forum.

p2pool today would fail but so would trying to run a 9TH/s pool using first version of pool backend.

p2pool can (and likely will need to) be extended to form a p2pool backbone operating at very high difficulty but lower than block difficulty.  It would need a longer LP target time and that means even higher difficulty.  At 5TH/s and a 30 second target time the backone would have a dynamic difficulty of ~35,000. 

With difficulty of 35K the only entities that could connect to p2pool backbone (with reasonable variance) would be major hashing farms, current solo miners, conventional pools, and "sub-p2pools".

Smaller miners could join (either manually or via a pool selection protocol) sub-p2pools which operate at a smaller target window and lower difficulty.  Miners would get credit for sub-p2pool shares which would update their "local" share-chain.  When a miner finds a p2pool-backbone difficulty share it would be submitted up to the p2pool-backbone and that would update the p2pool-backbone level share chain.    When any entity finds the block it would have the current p2pool-backbone sharechain reward split and that would include all subp2pools which submitted 1+ shares in last 24 hours.

So yes p2pool could with improvement support all bitcoin mining in a decentralized fashion.

[DeathAndTaxes]

You are right about p2pool not being able to take on the whole network. I would also like a solution to this and will pay a large amount for it. A whole new p2p system from scratch would be the best way to go.

See my post above but a whole new p2pool system would be neither desirable nor necessary.  Currently p2pool doesn't have the hashpower to make more complex system necessary.

In time organically p2pool hashrate will rise and with it the difficulty.  At that point a p2pool could be forked to have a longer share window.  This would increase the difficulty even higher.  That is all that is necessary to form a p2pool backbone.   

If subpoools are ready to form & connect at this point smaller miners would simply create/join a subp2pool.  Existing pools could already be part of backbone and would now just be operating at a higher difficulty level.

Rebuilding from scratch isn't a good idea. 

Really to support a backbone & sub pool model only two things need to change:
1) The backbone p2pool needs a larger share window.  This is because LP at the sub pool level will be based on LP both internally AND at the backbone.  With 10 sec on the backbone and 10 sec locally that will make LP interval too small.  This is a simple step (difficulty is simply increased by the multiple of window size) but shouldn't be done until sub p2pools are ready.

2) The current protocol is limited to 1 share = 1 address.  However a sub-p2pool (or conventional pool wanted to provide transparency) would want 1 share split among multiple users.  So the protocol would need to understand 1 share = n addresses.  This change is latent so could happen at any time.

[kano]

...
2) The current protocol is limited to 1 share = 1 address.  However a sub-p2pool (or conventional pool wanted to provide transparency) would want 1 share split among multiple users.  So the protocol would need to understand 1 share = n addresses.  This change is latent so could happen at any time.

Don't forget the block coinbase micro payments that p2pool represents.
The block-chain bloat, if everyone was using p2pool, would be enormous.
Again, the little guy.
Standard pools resolve that well.