[~1000 GH/sec] BTC Guild - 0% Fee Pool, LP, SSL, Full Precision, and More

[eleuthria]

But this is not true.

Because the "legal" miner gets to colaborate more in the long rounds, the ones that are less profitable, while the pool hoppers jump to a new one and stop collaborating. In the more profitable rounds, the pool hoopers get their complete share.

Supposedly you are collaborating in the long rounds because it gets compensated in the short rounds and with time its even. But if some of the miners only collaborate fully in the short runs and only a part collaborate in the long rounds, the less profitables, there is a problem where some are benefiting at the expense of others.

Please point out why another pool's payouts during that time affect the normal BTC Guild user.  You quoted one of three scenarios.  In the end, the non hoppers make the same BTC/minute whether the hoppers were involved for all of the round, part of the round, or none of the round.

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[fcmatt]

But this is not true.

Because the "legal" miner gets to colaborate more in the long rounds, the ones that are less profitable, while the pool hoppers jump to a new one and stop collaborating. In the more profitable rounds, the pool hoopers get their complete share.

Supposedly you are collaborating in the long rounds because it gets compensated in the short rounds and with time its even. But if some of the miners only collaborate fully in the short runs and only a part collaborate in the long rounds, the less profitables, there is a problem where some are benefiting at the expense of others.

but once the hopper leaves.. their payout slowly decreases on this btcguild long block... and if they jump to a pool and get caught up
in another long block.. their payout will be small there too. what was lost at BTCguild needs to be made up for at the other pool. seems there is a bit of luck involved in all this...
the maths is tricky.

i am not saying pool hopping cannot make you more.. but i am not clear on just how much more.. and luck
can go both ways.

[hugolp]

But this is not true.

Because the "legal" miner gets to colaborate more in the long rounds, the ones that are less profitable, while the pool hoppers jump to a new one and stop collaborating. In the more profitable rounds, the pool hoopers get their complete share.

Supposedly you are collaborating in the long rounds because it gets compensated in the short rounds and with time its even. But if some of the miners only collaborate fully in the short runs and only a part collaborate in the long rounds, the less profitables, there is a problem where some are benefiting at the expense of others.

Please point out why another pool's payouts during that time affect the normal BTC Guild user.  You quoted one of three scenarios.  In the end, the non hoppers make the same BTC/minute whether the hoppers were involved for all of the round, part of the round, or none of the round.

First, the "legal" user does not benefit from having the hoopers in the short runs or in the beggining of the long rounds. Yes, it will make the pool discover rounds quicker, but then the bitcoins have to be divided among more people, so there is no increase in profit from having the hoopers for the "legal" miner. Maybe the only advantage is a reduction on variance, but only maybe because they leave in the long rounds making them longer (Im not really sure about the net result on variance but its irrelevant, the point is that it does not increase the profits for the "legal" miner to have the hoopers).

Then, the shares in the quick rounds are more profitable than the shares in the long rounds. Ideally everybody would want to have luck and get quick rounds. But we know that over time things even out, so "legal" miners assume that they will get an even number of more profitable shares and less profitable shares. But pool hoopers get a bigger number of more profitable shares, while leaving the less profitable shares to the "legal" miners that have to assume its costs alone.

Is that clearer?

EDIT: Its easy to prove that hoopers are taking bitcoins from "legal" miners in other way: Since bitcoins are created at a predictable rate (lets ignore difficulty changes for this), and hoopers make more bitcoins by changing pools (and this can be demostrated easily), it means that there are less bitcoins for the rest. This is because the "legal" miners work more on the less profitable shares (the ones from the long rounds) than the hoopers.

[fcmatt]

But pool hoopers get a bigger number of more profitable shares, while leaving the less profitable shares to the "legal" miners that have to assume its costs alone.

this is the assumption or ?fact? that makes pool hopping more profitable. i get it.
no need for me to debate it...

but does not luck play a role in all this? that a pool hopper could leave a long round
only to join another pool in a long round... only to hop again to another long round...
and eventually run out of pools.. with all that work stuck in long rounds loosing value
as they finally sit in a PPS pool.

now the flip side is that they could leave a long round and get a couple lucky short
ones in.. but that is not guaranteed.. and often short rounds are routinely discovered
by only the largest pools.. so you will run out pools to hop into quickly since some try
to defeat pool hopping...
so now you go to PPS pool and sit there until a round is solved... and start over again.

how does luck play into all this for a pool hopper. sometimes they get some short in..
sometimes they sit in a PPS... how does it even out over time.. how big of an advantage?
i heard 28% being spoken about.

just thinking out loud. no need to respond back if you do not feel like it.


also... btcguild just had a very short round.. 1:15 seconds.. a pool hopper better be scraping
the screen at btcguild quite a bit to get in on those.. i am not clear how else they would know
a block is being solved by all these places otherwise... if they scrape every 30 seconds they just
lost out on a significant chance to make some BTC... regulars did quite well though.

[hugolp]

But pool hoopers get a bigger number of more profitable shares, while leaving the less profitable shares to the "legal" miners that have to assume its costs alone.

this is the assumption or ?fact? that makes pool hopping more profitable. i get it.
no need for me to debate it...

but does not luck play a role in all this? that a pool hopper could leave a long round
only to join another pool in a long round... only to hop again to another long round...
and eventually run out of pools.. with all that work stuck in long rounds loosing value
as they finally sit in a PPS pool.

now the flip side is that they could leave a long round and get a couple lucky short
ones in.. but that is not guaranteed.. and often short rounds are routinely discovered
by only the largest pools.. so you will run out pools to hop into quickly since some try
to defeat pool hopping...
so now you go to PPS pool and sit there until a round is solved... and start over again.

how does luck play into all this for a pool hopper. sometimes they get some short in..
sometimes they sit in a PPS... how does it even out over time.. how big of an advantage?
i heard 28% being spoken about.

just thinking out loud. no need to respond back if you do not feel like it.

Hoopers, at least inteligent hoopers, only jump to pools that just started a round, and then leave to join another pool that just started their round. Im sure there will be better optimizations, I am not a pool hooper so I dont know them. But the key is that you know when a round starts, but not when a round ends, so by being at the beggining of each round in different pools you increase the probability of getting the more profitable shares while avoiding part of the less profitable shares.

They key is that you know when a round starts but not when it ends.

[fcmatt]

i posted this above but relevant here after your last post.

"also... btcguild just had a very short round.. 1:15 seconds.. a pool hopper better be scraping
the screen at btcguild quite a bit to get in on those.. i am not clear how else they would know
a block is being solved by all these places otherwise... if they scrape every 30 seconds they just
lost out on a significant chance to make some BTC... regulars did quite well though."

so are people scraping btcguild's website every 2 seconds to make sure they can get in on these
super short ones?

otherwise you would need a miner connected to btcguild via long polling to get a message saying
time to work on a new block.. i think...

[hugolp]

i posted this above but relevant here after your last post.

"also... btcguild just had a very short round.. 1:15 seconds.. a pool hopper better be scraping
the screen at btcguild quite a bit to get in on those.. i am not clear how else they would know
a block is being solved by all these places otherwise... if they scrape every 30 seconds they just
lost out on a significant chance to make some BTC... regulars did quite well though."

so are people scraping btcguild's website every 2 seconds to make sure they can get in on these
super short ones?

Its easy to read the JSON. But yes, I dont know if they do it, as I said Im not a hooper. In this sense its probably easier for the hoopers to operate in smaller pools so the probability of a very short round is a lot lower.

[sharky112065]

i posted this above but relevant here after your last post.

"also... btcguild just had a very short round.. 1:15 seconds.. a pool hopper better be scraping
the screen at btcguild quite a bit to get in on those.. i am not clear how else they would know
a block is being solved by all these places otherwise... if they scrape every 30 seconds they just
lost out on a significant chance to make some BTC... regulars did quite well though."

so are people scraping btcguild's website every 2 seconds to make sure they can get in on these
super short ones?

otherwise you would need a miner connected to btcguild via long polling to get a message saying
time to work on a new block.. i think...

According to the other thread they do not have to scrape the screen. They have miner software that does all the data gathering for them and it switches them automatically.

Eleuthria, I agree also that the formula should not be modified for calculating payouts. But I do think that delaying stats by one hour would work just fine. Seems to work for Deepbit with over 4 Thash/s (as in it's not affecting their pool size at all by keeping the hoppers at bay).

[Druas]

Why would a hour delay really bother people? It doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

[fcmatt]

i posted this above but relevant here after your last post.

"also... btcguild just had a very short round.. 1:15 seconds.. a pool hopper better be scraping
the screen at btcguild quite a bit to get in on those.. i am not clear how else they would know
a block is being solved by all these places otherwise... if they scrape every 30 seconds they just
lost out on a significant chance to make some BTC... regulars did quite well though."

so are people scraping btcguild's website every 2 seconds to make sure they can get in on these
super short ones?

Its easy to read the JSON. But yes, I dont know if they do it, as I said Im not a hooper. In this sense its probably easier for the hoopers to operate in smaller pools so the probability of a very short round is a lot lower.

bah.. silly me. i forgot about the APIs. Very easy to gather info every second or what not.
that is the key ingredient to make pool hopping software easy to script in a linux shell compared
to screen scraping or miner with long polling.

all signs are pointing to pool hopping being more profitable but just how much more is unknown to me
on average over a week/month time frame.

[fcmatt]

According to the other thread they do not have to scrape the screen. They have miner software that does all the data gathering for them and it switches them automatically.

Eleuthria, I agree also that the formula should not be modified for calculating payouts. But I do think that delaying stats by one hour would work just fine. Seems to work for Deepbit with over 4 Thash/s (as in it's not affecting their pool size at all by keeping the hoppers at bay).

sharky.. i forgot about the API/JSON stuff. "miner software" is just a sh/perl script in linux. trivial to write
if you want to and put your mind to it. the logic of when to switch around is the interesting part. not the
gathering of info from pool hopping friendly pools.

now we just need a pool hopping person to chime in with a test they did showing some proof.
that 600 mh/s left on btcguild for example earned this much. while another pool hopping 600 mh/s
earned this much over the same time period. And not just a few days.. but many days. accounting
for any downtime, pool outages, and whatever else can possibly ruin a test.

[eleuthria]

The point isn't that pool hopping isn't more money.  It is.  Putting your shares into pools with the shortest round is going to make you more money.

But my point is that in terms of BTC/minute, your payouts from BTC Guild are the same no matter what pool hoppers are doing:  Staying in the pool the whole time, jumping to another pool, or not being in the pool at all.

Technically, pool hopping does hurt the pool because long rounds take even longer than they should, so a higher percentage of your pool's time is functioning at a low BTC/minute from bad luck rounds.

However, this argument is only valid IF the pool hoppers were going to stay on the pool in the first place.  My argument is that nobody that has the setup to pool hop would bother being on the pool in the first place if we had a stat delay/score system.  There are many other proportional/real-time pools out there to hop on.  As such, pool hoppers not being on the pool at all will actually mean the long rounds do last slightly longer than if the pool hoppers were on them for the first couple of minutes.

[hugolp]

The point isn't that pool hopping isn't more money.  It is.  Putting your shares into pools with the shortest round is going to make you more money.

But my point is that in terms of BTC/minute, your payouts from BTC Guild are the same no matter what pool hoppers are doing:  Staying in the pool the whole time, jumping to another pool, or not being in the pool at all.

Technically, pool hopping does hurt the pool because long rounds take even longer than they should, so a higher percentage of your pool's time is functioning at a low BTC/minute from bad luck rounds.

However, this argument is only valid IF the pool hoppers were going to stay on the pool in the first place.  My argument is that nobody that has the setup to pool hop would bother being on the pool in the first place if we had a stat delay/score system.  There are many other proportional/real-time pools out there to hop on.  As such, pool hoppers not being on the pool at all will actually mean the long rounds do last slightly longer than if the pool hoppers were on them for the first couple of minutes.

If the pool hoopers know when the rounds start in real time, they hurt the rest of the users. If they dont, then pool hooping becomes random and they can not profit and do not hurt others.

Pool hooping is only profitable if they know when the round is starting. So yes, delay the stats 1 hour (or whatever) and pool hooping problem is gone.

[TheMalon]

So yes, delay the stats 1 hour (or whatever) and pool hooping problem is gone.

That won't solve the "problem" because they will use the LP feature of the pool!

[Palmdetroit]

So yes, delay the stats 1 hour (or whatever) and pool hooping problem is gone.

That won't solve the "problem" because they will use the LP feature of the pool!

Indeed.

>SMPPS

[fcmatt]

So yes, delay the stats 1 hour (or whatever) and pool hooping problem is gone.

That won't solve the "problem" because they will use the LP feature of the pool!

but that eliminates, i am betting, the unsophisticated pool hoppers as i do not know
of free software for pool hoppers to use that is that advanced. as another person posted
they probably all use the JSON API to get the data.

or am i mistaken?

[sharky112065]

The point isn't that pool hopping isn't more money.  It is.  Putting your shares into pools with the shortest round is going to make you more money.

But my point is that in terms of BTC/minute, your payouts from BTC Guild are the same no matter what pool hoppers are doing:  Staying in the pool the whole time, jumping to another pool, or not being in the pool at all.

Technically, pool hopping does hurt the pool because long rounds take even longer than they should, so a higher percentage of your pool's time is functioning at a low BTC/minute from bad luck rounds.

However, this argument is only valid IF the pool hoppers were going to stay on the pool in the first place.  My argument is that nobody that has the setup to pool hop would bother being on the pool in the first place if we had a stat delay/score system.  There are many other proportional/real-time pools out there to hop on.  As such, pool hoppers not being on the pool at all will actually mean the long rounds do last slightly longer than if the pool hoppers were on them for the first couple of minutes.

The three largest pools are Deepbit, BTC Guild, and Slush.  If you cut them out by delaying stats, they will be effectively cut off. I have looked at some of those other pools that are smaller and cannot see how it would be profitable for them to hop when it takes 8+ hours to solve a block.

You seem to be worried that it will decrease the capacity of your pool, but it does not in the long run. Look at Deepbit for example.

If they get in on a really long block at BTC Guild and hop out, it takes the rest of us longer to solve the block, thus less blocks solved in a 24hr period, thus less money.

I really would not care much if they had to do all this manually, but now they have software that does the work for them.

IMO they are stealing from the rest of the miners who stay.

[hugolp]

So yes, delay the stats 1 hour (or whatever) and pool hooping problem is gone.

That won't solve the "problem" because they will use the LP feature of the pool!

I am completely ignorant about how LP works, but does it really report when a new round on the pool starts, or only signals when a new block has been found (in some pool but you can not know in which one)? In the first case pool hooping is posible with LP, in the second case its not.

[TheMalon]

So yes, delay the stats 1 hour (or whatever) and pool hooping problem is gone.

That won't solve the "problem" because they will use the LP feature of the pool!

but that eliminates, i am betting, the unsophisticated pool hoppers as i do not know
of free software for pool hoppers to use that is that advanced. as another person posted
they probably all use the JSON API to get the data.

or am i mistaken?

Actually it takes 10 min of programming for a low skilled programmer to make an alarm type of software for the block change detection using LP feature!

[flower1024]

but that doesn't help at all as you don't know who found the block.

could be a solo miner.

multipool tried to detect new rounds on deepbit that way. it wasn't very efficient.