Wonder who this solominer is? 88.6.216.9

[Raoul Duke]

Banks using a blockchain makes about as much sense as dictatorship holding annual elections with only 1 candidate on the ballot.

But, that's what they do(or did)...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estado_Novo_%28Portugal%29

Executive authority was nominally vested in a president, elected by popular vote for a five-year term. The legislature was a unicameral National Assembly, elected every four years. An advisory body, the Corporative Chamber, nominally represented economic, social and cultural organizations. In practice, however, the system was completely dominated by Salazar. While opposition candidates theoretically could stand for office, in practice the system was so heavily rigged in favour of the official party, the National Union, that they had no realistic chance of winning.

And that went on for almost 50 years. Figure that out...

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[guruvan]

Banks don't need a blockchain.  The purpose of a blockchain is to provide consensus in an anonymous decentralized environment without any central authority.

Banks using a blockchain makes about as much sense as dictatorship holding annual elections with only 1 candidate on the ballot.

Which dictators do all the time.

I would think banks would want irreversible interbank transactions/records. Why wouldn't they?

I could even see them wanting anonymous interbank transfers (they're usually the primary money launderers - why not find a new route now that the US/UN has shut that down so much?)

I don't see why a bank wouldn't want consensus on "what is the agreed upon value of the total money supply" , and where did it come from and go to - the $15,000,000,000 that Lord James discovered to be back by some 750,000 TONS of gold (which can't possibly exist!) just appeared - you don't think the banks would want consensus that you can't introduce ludicrous amounts of "money" into the global supply? I do.

"banks don't want bitcoin" is not a valid argument for anything in my book. They may not like their customers using it, but they sure don't all trust each other. I don't see why it isn't perfect for them to use between themselves. (maybe I should be enlightened?)

I do see some being old, stuck in old ways, and not adopting new technologies, but they'll die off soon enough. Like newspapers.

[rjk]

Banks don't need a blockchain.  The purpose of a blockchain is to provide consensus in an anonymous decentralized environment without any central authority.

Banks using a blockchain makes about as much sense as dictatorship holding annual elections with only 1 candidate on the ballot.

Which dictators do all the time.

I would think banks would want irreversible interbank transactions/records. Why wouldn't they?

I could even see them wanting anonymous interbank transfers (they're usually the primary money launderers - why not find a new route now that the US/UN has shut that down so much?)

I don't see why a bank wouldn't want consensus on "what is the agreed upon value of the total money supply" , and where did it come from and go to - the $15,000,000,000 that Lord James discovered to be back by some 750,000 TONS of gold (which can't possibly exist!) just appeared - you don't think the banks would want consensus that you can't introduce ludicrous amounts of "money" into the global supply? I do.

"banks don't want bitcoin" is not a valid argument for anything in my book. They may not like their customers using it, but they sure don't all trust each other. I don't see why it isn't perfect for them to use between themselves. (maybe I should be enlightened?)

I do see some being old, stuck in old ways, and not adopting new technologies, but they'll die off soon enough. Like newspapers.

If they only wanted to use it for inter-bank transfers, they would pre-mine a bunch of coins and then disable the block reward completely. Then use the mining to do confirmations, and assign an arbitrary value to each coin. But this doesn't really seem to be necessary, unless they were trying to combat insider theft on a grand scale.

[bittenbob]

Has anyone tried tracing the coinbase of the MM blocks to see where those coins are ending up? I know it might be hard to find out exactly where they are going but it would be interesting if this could be a way to track down the bot net owner.

[jjiimm_64]

Has anyone tried tracing the coinbase of the MM blocks to see where those coins are ending up? I know it might be hard to find out exactly where they are going but it would be interesting if this could be a way to track down the bot net owner.

we are not sure if it is a bot.....

[kunibopl]

maybe it's helpful to speculate about MMs motifs.
I guess it would be noticed if he starts selling his coins.
is it a fair assumption, that he didn't sell the biggest part of his coins up till now?
so is he doing it for the money or preparing to kill bitcoin?
he surely can manipulate the BTC value to some degree.
if he's out for money he's of course not bound to offer the coins on MtGox, he could also buy loads of cocaine and sell this.
he then wouldn't want to disrupt bitcoin. it was pointed out, that his ideal hashing power would be somewhere around 20%.

another question: someone suggested to talk to the ISP of his current IP. who could possibly be that in a decentralized network?
anybody? ok, wouldn't help much, probably. MM surely is reading here :-).

[molecular]

it's tom's hardware testing GPUs:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/graphics-card-benchmarks-charts-review,3154-8.html

[paraipan]

it's tom's hardware testing GPUs:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/graphics-card-benchmarks-charts-review,3154-8.html

yep, and the results are interesting

sorry for off-topic, watching the thread...

[BinaryMage]

it's tom's hardware testing GPUs:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/graphics-card-benchmarks-charts-review,3154-8.html

yep, and the results are interesting

sorry for off-topic, watching the thread...

Heh. I get more with a 5870 than they do with a 7970. They should really have someone knowledgeable do their benchmarks.

[runeks]

It's an interesting phenomenon we are seeing here. At the end of the day, designing a system that "just works" without employing it is very hard. So it would be no surprise if we found out that Bitcoin, in its current form, needs adjustments. We have seen with BIP 16 that this is possible, as long as the miners have faith in whomever proposes the solution. Of course the required change in this case might be different, as a core protocol change could be required. It will, in any case, be interesting to see where this leads.

The most important thing is to not rush into finding a solution. This is how bureaucracy is created, and one of the worst things that could happen to Bitcoin. One imperfect solution on top of the next. The "no empty blocks"-rule is an example of this, in my opinion. Generally, when we observe misbehavior like this, we shouldn't really be asking ourselves how to prevent it. We should be asking ourselves: why does it occur in the first place? There are numerous ways we can prevent this from happening, but if we don't solve the fundamental structure of incentivizing cooperation, we have solved nothing.

It seems to me that the simplicity of the situation is that for this particular miner, the reward for including transactions in a block is not worth the effort required to do so. This is not really surprising, given that fees comprise less than 0.15% of total block reward (using the newest post as of this writing: 174195). It seems obvious that this is not due to - as some speculate - the cost of processing power, ie. doing the signature check. This is obviously a tiny effort both in time and power costs. The real cost is maintaining a block chain. This requires first downloading over 1 GB of data and subsequently updating this block chain with every newly incoming transaction (which in itself requires connections to - preferably - multiple nodes). This is quite a task for a decentralized botnet.
There's a simple way to mitigate this though: start paying more fees .

[BinaryMage]

It's an interesting phenomenon we are seeing here. At the end of the day, designing a system that "just works" without employing it is very hard. So it would be no surprise if we found out that Bitcoin, in its current form, needs adjustments. We have seen with BIP 16 that this is possible, as long as the miners have faith in whomever proposes the solution. Of course the required change in this case might be different, as a core protocol change could be required. It will, in any case, be interesting to see where this leads.

The most important thing is to not rush into finding a solution. This is how bureaucracy is created, and one of the worst things that could happen to Bitcoin. One imperfect solution on top of the next. The "no empty blocks"-rule is an example of this, in my opinion. Generally, when we observe misbehavior like this, we shouldn't really be asking ourselves how to prevent it. We should be asking ourselves: why does it occur in the first place? There are numerous ways we can prevent this from happening, but if we don't solve the fundamental structure of incentivizing cooperation, we have solved nothing.

It seems to me that the simplicity of the situation is that for this particular miner, the reward for including transactions in a block is not worth the effort required to do so. This is not really surprising, given that fees comprise less than 0.15% of total block reward (using the newest post as of this writing: 174195). It seems obvious that this is not due to - as some speculate - the cost of processing power, ie. doing the signature check. This is obviously a tiny effort both in time and power costs. The real cost is maintaining a block chain. This requires first downloading over 1 GB of data and subsequently updating this block chain with every newly incoming transaction (which in itself requires connections to - preferably - multiple nodes). This is quite a task for a decentralized botnet.
There's a simple way to mitigate this though: start paying more fees .

An excellent point. But as to the solution you suggest, that kind of societal shift works when everybody cares about the currency - but not when most of the people here simply want to make money. We can certainly change the software to require more fees, but I don't think enough people will put up their bitcoins out of care for the currency to solve the problem.

[nibor]

I see no mystery blocks since the 1st April switch...
http://blockchain.info/ip-address/71.123.170.150

Guess they are having to recode their software?

[Clipse]

I see no mystery blocks since the 1st April switch...
http://blockchain.info/ip-address/71.123.170.150

Guess they are having to recode their software?

Im pretty sure he caught on to the forum posts and just started to accept TX's, hashrate for unknown remained(in fact grew slightly) since 1 April.

Also, the Myster Miner is running across multiple relays, that single IP means nothing.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Clipse nailed it.

Lack of 0 tx blocks could be
a) mystery is getting orphaned out due to incompatible blocks
b) he started including txs


While "a" is certainly possible we should have seen a 15% increase in avg block time which hasn't happened over the last 4 days.

[P4man]

While "a" is certainly possible we should have seen a 15% increase in avg block time which hasn't happened over the last 4 days.

There definitely has been a drop:



And lots of orphans. Though other pools made the same mistake, I do suspect MM dropped the ball.

[rjk]

Orphans are primarily due to the enabling of BIP16, I suspect.

[DeepBit]

Lack of 0 tx blocks could be
a) mystery is getting orphaned out due to incompatible blocks
b) he started including txs

a+b is possible too.

[edd]

Lack of 0 tx blocks could be
a) mystery is getting orphaned out due to incompatible blocks
b) he started including txs

a+b is possible too.

I thought MM got caught in a sinkhole.

[P4man]

Orphans are primarily due to the enabling of BIP16, I suspect.

Yeah, but the question is if those include MMs. Is there a chart or table somewhere with orphans?

[piuk]

Orphans are primarily due to the enabling of BIP16, I suspect.

I thought this as well but there has hardly been any P2SH transactions.

510b5a44935109e249a704c2900aa9d8303166062e81d2ac852c965b6266dcee      
d0636198ea55fadee5b4ccc07c85012db7d07c2d25790b3aec770c86617801c0      
9ab59e2d4be16c470160eb9b9a9d9799eaf29af0461aea131e748659d806fa1a
658fc92061f1c4125d5cd1034eb8a1f09bfebd32a988d855eb7ee63689759a21
b0539a45de13b3e0403909b8bd1a555b8cbe45fd4e3f3fda76f3a5f52835c29d
9c08a4d78931342b37fd5f72900fb9983087e6f46c4a097d8a1f52c74e28eaf6

are the only ones ever.

Is there a chart or table somewhere with orphans?

http://blockchain.info/orphaned-blocks