Wonder who this solominer is? 88.6.216.9

[jjiimm_64]

IMO  we have all bypassed the real issue here.

this 'miner'  has solved 3 blocks in less then an hour.  so what he has not included transactions...... 

I am a noob when it comes to understanding the exact process of solving a block.  all I know is that with my 40g, it takes on avg 2 days....

The real question is, has someone figured out a way to circumvent the 'proof of work' that every one else is doing?

Are they just throttling the blocks so they don't get too many too soon?  I noticed that the difficulty magically went down for the last 500 blocks of the last change to keep diff about where it is now..

if it is a bot..  it would have to be multi million cpus... and some gpus?  i dont know.  if it is a bot, they have not bypassed the proof of work..


thoughts?

[1714475086]

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[DeathAndTaxes]

nobody bypassed that issue.  The miner likely has 1.0 to 1.4 TH/s of hashing power.  Nothing indicates he has bypassed the proof of work.  If he has why stop at 1.4 TH/s "effective hashing power".  Why not 10 TH/s and make 8x as much.

He is a big miner.  It would be like saying Deepbit solved 3 blocks last hour so they must have broken SHA-256.

[rjk]

nobody bypassed that issue.  The miner likely has 1.0 to 1.4 TH/s of hashing power.  Nothing indicates he has bypassed the proof of work.  If he has why stop at 1.4 TH/s "effective hashing power".  Why not 10 TH/s and make 8x as much.

He is a big miner.  It would be like saying Deepbit solved 3 blocks last hour so they must have broken SHA-256.

Not only this, but botnets cost money to rent, and my guess is that he shows up occasionally because the botnet operator is selling it to other "customers" for things like spam as well. Whether the botnet owner is the one that is mining, or whether the miner is just someone paying the botnet owner for processing time, I don't know.

[gnar1ta$]

nobody bypassed that issue.  The miner likely has 1.0 to 1.4 TH/s of hashing power.  Nothing indicates he has bypassed the proof of work.  If he has why stop at 1.4 TH/s "effective hashing power".  Why not 10 TH/s and make 8x as much.

He is a big miner.  It would be like saying Deepbit solved 3 blocks last hour so they must have broken SHA-256.

Isn't this just a 'guess' since hashrate is calculated based on block solving rate?  If someone has bypassed the proof of work, we would be calculating the hashrate incorrectly. 

[DeathAndTaxes]

Isn't this just a 'guess' since hashrate is calculated based on block solving rate?  If someone has bypassed the proof of work, we would be calculating the hashrate incorrectly. 

However if someone has broken SHA-256 and can solve 3 blocks per hour with a handful of computers why not buy 10 handful of computers and solve 30 blocks per hour?

He wants money but only the amount of money that 1.4TH/s "effective" produces.  Not less money and not more money he has just decided that is the right amount.

Seems implausible at best.  If nothing else one would expect greed to creep in.  If you had a method to print $750 per hour you wouldn't be tempted to "boost" that to say $1000 per hour or $1250 per hour?  Nope. Not going above $750 per hour.  Also not going lower to reduce suspicion, and not going to include tx which really makes me stand out.

[jjiimm_64]

yes, throttling ensures he can keep it going..  too many too fast will send btc value to zero in a hurry

[spiccioli]

muyuu,

why do you want bitcoin to become more or less like a bank?

using fees to stop empty blocks is wrong and can become cumbersome.

I know many bitcoiners are bitcoiners in the first place because of hatred towards banks. But that was not the point at all.

It's not being like banks. It's that banks address the same concerns when they process transfers:

- they want to collect a fee
- they don't want to discourage transfers as that means no fee
- they know they can collect more when transfers are bigger, because it means more money is involved
- they try not to over-collect over a point as their cost is the same and big players can start looking for different channels

So basically trying to collect in a similar way to banks is not being like banks. It means banks have to address the same problem.

I came with the transfer fee scheme (as usually happens in Europe) and DeathAndTaxes countered with a check fee scheme. Checks are not the same as typical checks are all within a quantity big enough that's worth to go and collect, and not so big it's crazy to pick such amount of money in cash. So a fixed scheme suits that well.

Bankers also pee and sleep? do you sleep or do you try to avoid behaving like a banker?

instead, stop blocks that do not contain at least n% of waiting (at the time block is solved) transactions, where n can be based on the number of waiting transactions or their value (input+output).

this way you don't have fees and you can even mine empty blocks if nobody is doing transactions, otherwise you have to do you work and confirm them.

spiccioli

This involves dealing with network implementation concerns. Thing is, it's not really trivial to determine if a miner has not seen a transaction or he has simply ignored it. It's probably a feasible mechanism within some accepted % error.

All this extra networking work would not be compensated though. Remember miners have no obligation to include transactions. I can understand big miners will try to use this opportunity to enforce some fees, and rightly so. You are basically asking the miners to do extra work to guarantee that freeloaders can continue to use their work for free, and that they will compete with botnets and "free electricity dorms" with no compensation whatsoever.

muyuu,

the problem is not that miners do some work to test if transactions have been included in solved block or not, it is not even asking miners to do some more work for free: if a miner does not want to do some more work he can quit.

the problem is how to avoid that a big enough miner, who mines empty blocks only, is able to disrupt the bitcoin network.

given that the bitcoin network exists to handle transactions, if a block does not contain at least 20% (just to give a number) of waiting transactions it should not be accepted.

if this lowers all miners income, this is not a big issue, because it is just the price to pay to keep bitcoin healthy.

I'm not againt botnets, I'm against botnets who try to jeopardize the bitcoin network.

spiccioli.

[gnar1ta$]

Implausible but not impossible? I don't think anyone figured out how to cheat, but we really wouldn't know would we?  If I had figured out how to bypass the proof of work and produce as many blocks as I wanted, I would do all I could to keep doing it as long as possible.  Try not to raise difficulty too much, and not to appear to be more than 15-20% of the network - suspicion and hostility seem to grow exponetially the closer you get to 51% - and I wouldn't want to drop the price.

[muyuu]

Implausible but not impossible? I don't think anyone figured out how to cheat, but we really wouldn't know would we?  If I had figured out how to bypass the proof of work and produce as many blocks as I wanted, I would do all I could to keep doing it as long as possible.  Try not to raise difficulty too much, and not to appear to be more than 15-20% of the network - suspicion and hostility seem to grow exponetially the closer you get to 51% - and I wouldn't want to drop the price.

You do realise that if they've "solved" SHA1 they're onto something much bigger than this, right?

It's an amusing conspiracy theory, I give you that.

[wogaut]

Isn't this just a 'guess' since hashrate is calculated based on block solving rate?  If someone has bypassed the proof of work, we would be calculating the hashrate incorrectly. 

However if someone has broken SHA-256 and can solve 3 blocks per hour with a handful of computers why not buy 10 handful of computers and solve 30 blocks per hour?

He wants money but only the amount of money that 1.4TH/s "effective" produces.  Not less money and not more money he has just decided that is the right amount.

Seems implausible at best.  If nothing else one would expect greed to creep in.  If you had a method to print $750 per hour you wouldn't be tempted to "boost" that to say $1000 per hour or $1250 per hour?  Nope. Not going above $750 per hour.  Also not going lower to reduce suspicion, and not going to include tx which really makes me stand out.

yes, throttling ensures he can keep it going..  too many too fast will send btc value to zero in a hurry

Wow, and I nearly got crucified by just bringing up that thought in the past... 

The Bitcoin game is after all a game with many players, if one becomes the only viable player, there would soon be no profitable game anymore.

It's really hard to even discuss the topic "Can the bitcoin algorithm be broken?" because that's like blasphemy and could weaken the trust in bitcoin.
Nobody who broke that algorithm would immediately post their Eureka! moment.

But I'm glad that it gets discussed once in a while.

And if someone figured out a way to cheat, it doesn't automatically mean they completely "solved" SHA256. Even if you find a way to save some magnitudes of time, they'll be king.

[muyuu]

And if someone figured out a way to cheat, it doesn't automatically mean they completely "solved" SHA256. Even if you find a way to save some magnitudes of time, they'll be king.

This already happened when GPUs started mining (orders of magnitude faster mining). For a while a couple folks made a killing.

[DeathAndTaxes]

If you were smart enough to break SHA-256 and could mint money on a handful of low end computers don't you think you would be smart enough to

a) spread the blocks around (i.e. purchase some dedicated servers around the world)
b) include all transactions.

If that had been done nobody would even know "mystery" existed.  Likely any TH/s rise would be explained away as new BFL Singles coming online.

So someone is smart enough to break SHA-256 an algorithm which entire crypto world has been trying to attack for a decade and yet not smart enough to blend into an anonymous network.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor

[wogaut]

And if someone figured out a way to cheat, it doesn't automatically mean they completely "solved" SHA256. Even if you find a way to save some magnitudes of time, they'll be king.

This already happened when GPUs started mining (orders of magnitude faster mining). For a while a couple folks made a killing.

This is certainly right.
When I think of cheating I actually thought of bypassing some of the proof-of-work.

But certainly a new technology can do that too; the reason why I don't automatically throw new technologies into the same box as cheating, is that new technologies are part of progress and typically require a large initial investment. Otherwise we would all be mining like crazy with ASICs by now, with an astronomically high difficulty and similar block rate and profit as before.

@D&T. Yeah, the lack of including transactions is indeed something to ponder about.

Maybe this guy had the urge to create a mystery?  Just brain-farting...

[jjiimm_64]

If you were smart enough to break SHA-256 and could mint money on a handful of low end computers don't you think you would be smart enough to

a) spread the blocks around (i.e. purchase some dedicated servers around the world)
b) include all transactions.

If that had been done nobody would even know "mystery" existed.  Likely any TH/s rise would be explained away as new BFL Singles coming online.

So someone is smart enough to break SHA-256 an algorithm which entire crypto world has been trying to attack for a decade and yet not smart enough to blend into an anonymous network.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor

this is the best argument yet that proof of work has not been bypassed...  guess I can keep my gold 1000 btc bar a while longer

[gnar1ta$]

Is breaking SHA256 the only way to bypass proof-of-work?  

[DeathAndTaxes]

Is breaking SHA256 the only way to bypass proof-of-work?  

Yes.  By breaking I mean a pre-image or round reduction attack.

The "work" is taking the hashed block header, double hashing it, and checking if the result in smaller than the target.  It is that simple.

We know that based on probability that on average it will take 2^32 attempts to find a hash below the target at difficulty =1.  To do it in less than 2^32 attempts would require some pre-image or round reduction attack on SHA-256.

[Raize]

Considering ngzhang had about 100 FPGAs in his room mining at about 380 gigahash (EDIT: 38), it is entirely possible someone is just mining with FPGAs on their own. We've said his name numerous times, but he's not Beetlejuice. We all know he has the early money and funding to do it and the technical expertise to make it work.

Why isn't he including transactions? Because he doesn't have to. This happened in Bitcoin's history once before.

It's ArtForz, folks. Move along.

[rjk]

Considering ngzhang had about 100 FPGAs in his room mining at about 380 gigahash,

You made me LOL. 

[silverbox]

Considering ngzhang had about 100 FPGAs in his room mining at about 380 gigahash,

You made me LOL. 

Just a slip of the digit!!

[wogaut]

Considering ngzhang had about 100 FPGAs in his room mining at about 380 gigahash

A 3.8GH/s FPGA? Me waaaaant one!   

It's ArtForz, folks. Move along.

Evidence please?