Neighbourhood Pool Watch

[Starlightbreaker]

BC went down, now that it is up, organ think anything has changed?

So, you think they slowed the initial hash rate and share count to have hoppers stay longer and/or delaying block starts?  So, would that buffer be spread out over the "block" (fake) or just kept by the op?  I can see you can hop it but it's like a even worse coinotron...get killed on the short rounds...not a good mix with other prop pools...

Also, did BC just have a short round?  

huh.

weird.

my daily payment is close to double what i normally get now.  
must be the short blocks.



....wait, they have two short blocks?

[martychubbs]

BC went down, now that it is up, organ think anything has changed?

So, you think they slowed the initial hash rate and share count to have hoppers stay longer and/or delaying block starts?  So, would that buffer be spread out over the "block" (fake) or just kept by the op?  I can see you can hop it but it's like a even worse coinotron...get killed on the short rounds...not a good mix with other prop pools...

Also, did BC just have a short round?  

huh.

weird.

my daily payment is close to double what i normally get now.  
must be the short blocks.



....wait, they have two short blocks?

I know, hope they're back to normal

[DeathAndTaxes]

....wait, they have two short blocks?

Yeah they got busted stealing miner's coins so they had to stop taking short blocks as profit. 

[P4man]

Pools I have confidence in and would mine at (in no particular order)

• Slush's pool (once they're on whatever hop proof payment method Slush decides on)
• Ozcoin
• Eclipse

Why Slush? I 've investigated them more than any other pool. I'd have noticed anything odd.

Id certainly add bitminter to that list, and I have one concern with Slush; its not major, and I have no reason to distrust Slush, but I sure would like to see stats of shares submitted there. Must be the only pool that doesnt show it (expect for running round).

As for bitclockers, best I can tell their stats are still as fake as ever.
Maybe they thought faking a few short rounds would somehow be enough to disprove the mountain of evidence against them.

[Starlightbreaker]

....wait, they have two short blocks?

Yeah they got busted stealing miner's coins so they had to stop taking short blocks as profit. 

now they better give me back my coin they stole.
...and everybody elses.


i can safely assume we caught them red-handed.

it's interesting when your payout suddenly doubles after people call'em out.

[organofcorti]

It was great to watch two forums members that I respect have at each other in such a reasoned manner. Discussions of that sort don't take place on bitcointalk.org often enough. However I realised with some information over in hoppersden.info and some here farfiman and Mobius each only had part of the information available.

With that in mind I've posted Neighbourhood Pool Watch 1.5: Bitclockers.com summary. In it I reiterate what I've shown in both NHPW1 and here a couple of pages back (edit: make that 3 pages back) in one hopefully cogent post (I write 'hopefully' because I rushed it out before knives were drawn here, plus I had to cut bits out to get under the 10000 character limit.)

For those who can't be bothered reading the whole post, here's the tl;dr:

0. Introduction

There's been some confusion about exactly what is proven in regards to Bitclockers.com so I'm providing a summary on results so far with some results corrected.

My proofs can be divided into three categories:

1. Provable claim requiring no assumptions
2. Provable claim requiring one assumption
3. Claims that can't be proven but are likely on the balance of probabilities.

1. Provable claim requiring no assumptions

If Bitclockers.com are lying to their miners about when blocks are solved but not if blocks are solved .....it is simple to show empirically that strategic miners are being underpaid.

.........

2. Provable claim requiring one assumption

If Bitclockers.com are not lying to their miners about when blocks are solved or if blocks are solved, then we can prove that Bitclockers.com are underpaying all their miners by 21%, just using the available empirical data.

.........

3. Claims that can't be proven but are likely.

If Bitclockers.com are lying to their miners about if and when blocks are solved, not only are they not paying strategic miners their expected reward, Bitclockers.com may be withholding btc from all miners, for example from the very short rounds that they don't report. The possibility can be assessed fairly simply by examining the distribution of means for Bitclockers.com using the Central Limit Theorum.......So that's an extra bonus to the pool ops of more than 90 btc/month. This is a 2.81% addition to the 2% tax (about 65 btc/month), bringing it to a 4.81% tax overall.

.........

4. In conclusion
Case 1 is proven correct: By their own description of their payout method, Bitclockers.com is underpaying some miners and stealthily redistributing it to others.

Case 2 is only proven correct if the Bitclockers.com pool operators were being truthful when they stated that they reported blocks found as they occurred. Since they have recently been linking solved blocks to block explorer, this has become much more likely.

Case 3 is certainly possible, and on the balance of probabilities, even likely. If it is the case, all miners lose an additional 2.81% on top of the acknowledged 2% tax.

In conclusion, any time a pool does not disclose round statistics, it is too easy to 'fudge' the books and pay miners less than expected.

I hope this clears things up for everyone.

[organofcorti]

1.111~ sent,

Thanks, Transisto, I do appreciate that. Full disclosure: the donations I've gotten all of which I'm grateful for (special mention to Goat - thanks mate) has been spent on making me a "Donator" to this forum. Some of the next donations I get - if any - will go to hoppersden.info admin 'myself'.

Unfortunate that shady hopping countermeasure are being used to fake stats/payout,  when open and effective solution already exist.

And irritating. Instead of moving to a system that is unhoppable, full time miners lose money (less than usual but still some) to strategic miners, all so they can keep the hashrate boost that strategic miners provide. And this is ignoring all the other ways they can and probably have ripped off miners so far.

Ps: statistically speaking,,, Some pool that charge 10% for PPS and 3% for prop..  They make it sound as if running a prop pool with 4Ths was a risky business to the operator. , it's not.  ... Just saying... see sig.

Well, I'm going to disagree with you there. A pool needs at least 7% to make PPS risk manageable. So really, they'd be taking 3% on top of the risk tax (which would be put aside for long rounds) plus 3% on prop. That's only 1% above what other pools take so I don't think it's too greedy. Man's gotta eat.

[organofcorti]

BC went down, now that it is up, organ think anything has changed?

So, you think they slowed the initial hash rate and share count to have hoppers stay longer and/or delaying block starts?  So, would that buffer be spread out over the "block" (fake) or just kept by the op?  I can see you can hop it but it's like a even worse coinotron...get killed on the short rounds...not a good mix with other prop pools...

Also, did BC just have a short round?  

huh.

weird.

my daily payment is close to double what i normally get now.  
must be the short blocks.

....wait, they have two short blocks?

I know, hope they're back to normal

....wait, they have two short blocks?

Yeah they got busted stealing miner's coins so they had to stop taking short blocks as profit.  

It's a little odd, sure, but not impossible. They might have altered their algorith/transform function a little, but even using the transforms I previously identified (which might not be being used but do provide a guide), the equivalent geometric round shares at that D would be:

Code:

> qgeom(plnorm(0.1664707,-0.0627,0.4085),1/1376302.26)
[1] 15
> qgeom(plnorm(0.1565703,-0.0627,0.4085),1/1376302.26)
[1] 7
> qgeom(pgamma(0.1664707 ,6.080,5.949 ),1/1376302.26)
[1] 667
> qgeom(pgamma(0.1565703 ,6.080,5.949 ),1/1376302.26)
[1] 483
> qgeom(pllogis(0.1664707 ,4.3110,scale=1/1.0653),1/1376302.26)
[1] 794
> qgeom(pllogis(0.1565703 ,4.3110,scale=1/1.0653),1/1376302.26)
[1] 610

Round lengths as short as 7 shares or 700 shares do occur. Round lengths under one share do not. So, calculating the cdf at one share for the difficulty at that time, and using quantile functions to convert to a Bitclockers.com round length as a proportion of D, we get:

Code:

> pgeom(1,1/1376302.26)
[1] 1.453169e-06
> qllogis(1.453169e-06 ,4.3110,scale=1/1.0653)
[1] 0.04153282
> qlnorm(1.453169e-06,-0.0627,0.4085)
[1] 0.138985
> qgamma(1.453169e-06 ,6.080,5.949 )
[1] 0.05853246

So if we'd seen rounds between 0.04xD and 0.14xD, we could have been be pretty certain that they'd have changed their transform/algo. At the moment, I don't think we can say that. Looks possible though.

  

[organofcorti]

Pools I have confidence in and would mine at (in no particular order)

• Slush's pool (once they're on whatever hop proof payment method Slush decides on)
• Ozcoin
• Eclipse

Why Slush? I 've investigated them more than any other pool. I'd have noticed anything odd.

Id certainly add bitminter to that list, and I have one concern with Slush; its not major, and I have no reason to distrust Slush, but I sure would like to see stats of shares submitted there. Must be the only pool that doesnt show it (expect for running round).

Good oh. I've put a poll on which might be a better way of indicating what we think (although online polls are subject to gaming, I suppose). Care to vote?

[organofcorti]

I guess they wont be getting many votes then 

p2Pool isn't a pool either but it seems to be leading the pack.

[DeathAndTaxes]

I consider p2pool a pool.  It just happens to be a decentralized one.

[P4man]

Good oh. I've put a poll on which might be a better way of indicating what we think (although online polls are subject to gaming, I suppose). Care to vote?

Perhaps you should have allowed multiple votes and rephrase the question to "what pools do you trust".  Being honest, if I understood what Ive read so far, is that p2pool is the most trustworthy bar none.
But I still voted for bitminter .

[organofcorti]

Good oh. I've put a poll on which might be a better way of indicating what we think (although online polls are subject to gaming, I suppose). Care to vote?

Perhaps you should have allowed multiple votes and rephrase the question to "what pools do you trust".  Being honest, if I understood what Ive read so far, is that p2pool is the most trustworthy bar none.
But I still voted for bitminter .

Good point. Unfortunately once a poll is started, multiple votes is one of the things that can't be changed. No doubt there'll be a next time. Right after a "Which pool do you trust the least?" poll.

[Maged]

Good oh. I've put a poll on which might be a better way of indicating what we think (although online polls are subject to gaming, I suppose). Care to vote?

Perhaps you should have allowed multiple votes and rephrase the question to "what pools do you trust".  Being honest, if I understood what Ive read so far, is that p2pool is the most trustworthy bar none.
But I still voted for bitminter .

Good point. Unfortunately once a poll is started, multiple votes is one of the things that can't be changed. No doubt there'll be a next time. Right after a "Which pool do you trust the least?" poll.

You totally can change it. Just allow people to make multiple votes and allow them to edit their votes.

[organofcorti]

Good oh. I've put a poll on which might be a better way of indicating what we think (although online polls are subject to gaming, I suppose). Care to vote?

Perhaps you should have allowed multiple votes and rephrase the question to "what pools do you trust".  Being honest, if I understood what Ive read so far, is that p2pool is the most trustworthy bar none.
But I still voted for bitminter .

Good point. Unfortunately once a poll is started, multiple votes is one of the things that can't be changed. No doubt there'll be a next time. Right after a "Which pool do you trust the least?" poll.

You totally can change it. Just allow people to make multiple votes and allow them to edit their votes.

Not seeing it, sorry.



Is there another option somewhere?

[Maged]

You totally can change it. Just allow people to make multiple votes and allow them to edit their votes.

Not seeing it, sorry.

Is there another option somewhere?

Oh, interesting. Mods apparently have more powers than normal people...

Poll updated.

[organofcorti]

Thanks Maged.

Anyone who wants to update their vote or add votes, you'll have to remove your old vote first.

[K1773R]

why can you vote for scammers? thats stupid! (bitclockers)

[organofcorti]

why can you vote for scammers? thats stupid! (bitclockers)

To gauge the success of my posts, obviously.

[organofcorti]

why can you vote for scammers? thats stupid! (bitclockers)

To gauge the success of my posts, obviously.

Wish my proxy is in there. The people who use it know exactly where the hashes are being sent:)

Sorry, reading your thread I didn't think 'Proj#2' was up any more. Is it? If it is I'll add it.