BITMAIN announces Antpool

[dog1965]

Did anybody ever have this happen to them I sent the payment and it took over an hour to make the first confirmation. I only have an hour to send it. its marked paid but still says expired now what. I emailed BITMAIN they said just wait a few days for them to fix it but I don't trust this. Its a lot of coins for me to lose. for you guys its nothing for me its a lot. S7 by the way.


 

He's right.  Same thing happened to me.  I simply created a ticket at Bitmain Support and they took care of it.  It took about 24 hours total for the payment to be confirmed via email.  It took another 6 hours for my status in my "Orders" to be changed from "unpaid / unshipped / expired" to "Paid / unshipped / Valid."

I placed my order at 4:59am CST on 11/04/2015.

I emailed them at first they told me......

Dear customer,

 

Once payment received by Bitmain, we will notify you and confirm payment! For any other issues we will contact you.


Best Regards

BITMAIN


and that's when the btc was already confirmed as paid ! then they emailed me again apologizing there is a glitch in the system everything was corrected and now its valid and green again. The problem is the network or just coinbase is taking over an hour to make the first conformation by that time bitmains system already marked it expired. they should extend the wait time to more than a hour.


p.s bought something with bitcoin on another sight and coinbase or the network took more than an hour again ! at least this sight waited and as soon as conformation hit 1 the sight marked it as paid and shipped it out in 20 minutes I wish bitmain was like that.

[aarons6]

the bad thing is that this pool is one of the pools that is contributing to the slowness of confirmations by mining empty blocks with bad code..

[p3yot33at3r]

the bad thing is that this pool is one of the pools that is contributing to the slowness of confirmations by mining empty blocks with bad code..

Precisely. It's a little amusing to see miners who support a pool that doesn't contribute to the network complain about how long transactions take 

[TracerX]

the bad thing is that this pool is one of the pools that is contributing to the slowness of confirmations by mining empty blocks with bad code..

Precisely. It's a little amusing to see miners who support a pool that doesn't contribute to the network complain about how long transactions take 

I was having this same conversation with someone on Reddit earlier this week.  Pool _choose_ to submit empty block, am I wrong?  Bitfury has not posted a single empty block in the last week, while Antpool has posted ... 21 total empty blocks last week.  BitFury and Antpool averaged 22 and 28 blocks last week, respectively.

Am I wrong to conclude that the pools have a choice in the matter?

[eleuthria]

the bad thing is that this pool is one of the pools that is contributing to the slowness of confirmations by mining empty blocks with bad code..

Precisely. It's a little amusing to see miners who support a pool that doesn't contribute to the network complain about how long transactions take 

I was having this same conversation with someone on Reddit earlier this week.  Pool _choose_ to submit empty block, am I wrong?  Bitfury has not posted a single empty block in the last week, while Antpool has posted ... 21 total empty blocks last week.  BitFury and Antpool averaged 22 and 28 blocks last week, respectively.

Am I wrong to conclude that the pools have a choice in the matter?

They have a choice.  It's extremely unlikely that any time in the last 2 years there has ever been a point where there was not a single valid and non-spam transaction waiting for confirmation even at the exact time a block was solved.

EVERY chinese pool currently is making the choice that is bad for bitcoin.  The excuse is that internet connectivity in China to the outside world is shit.  The workaround is to not rely on their full bitcoin node to see the newest block on the network, and instead use active listening connections to other sources to see a new block header (not the whole block).  If they see a new block header, they'll immediately push out new work using that as the previous block, without doing any validation (because their node hasn't seen the full block yet).  The only way to do this is by making a block without any transactions because you don't know what was actually confirmed in the previous block.

Even after it was clearly shown this is a bad idea (see the soft fork earlier this year the chinese pools caused), they have stated they have no intention of stopping this activity.  So now the rest of the network has to live with pools that don't do their fucking jobs, causing longer transaction confirmation times, because miners are too stupid to stop mining on pools that are actively hurting the network.

[TracerX]

the bad thing is that this pool is one of the pools that is contributing to the slowness of confirmations by mining empty blocks with bad code..

Precisely. It's a little amusing to see miners who support a pool that doesn't contribute to the network complain about how long transactions take 

I was having this same conversation with someone on Reddit earlier this week.  Pool _choose_ to submit empty block, am I wrong?  Bitfury has not posted a single empty block in the last week, while Antpool has posted ... 21 total empty blocks last week.  BitFury and Antpool averaged 22 and 28 blocks last week, respectively.

Am I wrong to conclude that the pools have a choice in the matter?

They have a choice.  It's extremely unlikely that any time in the last 2 years there has ever been a point where there was not a single valid and non-spam transaction waiting for confirmation even at the exact time a block was solved.

EVERY chinese pool currently is making the choice that is bad for bitcoin.  The excuse is that internet connectivity in China to the outside world is shit.  The workaround is to not rely on their full bitcoin node to see the newest block on the network, and instead use active listening connections to other sources to see a new block header (not the whole block).  If they see a new block header, they'll immediately push out new work using that as the previous block, without doing any validation (because their node hasn't seen the full block yet).  The only way to do this is by making a block without any transactions because you don't know what was actually confirmed in the previous block.

Even after it was clearly shown this is a bad idea (see the soft fork earlier this year the chinese pools caused), they have stated they have no intention of stopping this activity.  So now the rest of the network has to live with pools that don't do their fucking jobs, causing longer transaction confirmation times, because miners are too stupid to stop mining on pools that are actively hurting the network.

Thank you for your prompt answer!  I appreciate someone with your experience chiming in--it appears to me that there is a fair amount of misinformation regarding the subject.  I would like to have a full understanding of the issue so that I can help educate others.  Could you point me towards the right direction, e.g. documentation of the mechanisms?

Cheers.

[eleuthria]

Thank you for your prompt answer!  I appreciate someone with your experience chiming in--it appears to me that there is a fair amount of misinformation regarding the subject.  I would like to have a full understanding of the issue so that I can help educate others.  Could you point me towards the right direction, e.g. documentation of the mechanisms?

The exact implementation isn't publicly documented as far as I'm aware.  All we know is that they will begin mining blocks before their own full nodes have actually seen them.  Who they are connected to, how many sources they wait to see the block from before switching (assuming more than 1), etc., are not publicly stated by any of the pools engaging in this activity (its referred to as SPV mining).

EDIT:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=700411.msg11790734#msg11790734 - F2pool/Discus Fish publicly stating that even after SPV mining by chinese pools caused a fork in 2015, they had no intention to stop doing so, and don't believe that Antpool or BTC China will either.  You can see clearly that all 3 pools are still doing it just by looking at the sheer number of empty blocks they mine each week.

[TracerX]

Thank you for your prompt answer!  I appreciate someone with your experience chiming in--it appears to me that there is a fair amount of misinformation regarding the subject.  I would like to have a full understanding of the issue so that I can help educate others.  Could you point me towards the right direction, e.g. documentation of the mechanisms?

The exact implementation isn't publicly documented as far as I'm aware.  All we know is that they will begin mining blocks before their own full nodes have actually seen them.  Who they are connected to, how many sources they wait to see the block from before switching (assuming more than 1), etc., are not publicly stated by any of the pools engaging in this activity (its referred to as SPV mining).

I'll learn more on SPV mining, thanks!

[TracerX]

EDIT:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=700411.msg11790734#msg11790734 - F2pool/Discus Fish publicly stating that even after SPV mining by chinese pools caused a fork in 2015, they had no intention to stop doing so, and don't believe that Antpool or BTC China will either.  You can see clearly that all 3 pools are still doing it just by looking at the sheer number of empty blocks they mine each week.

I'll stop thread-jacking, but I've got one more question if you would be so kind.  Under what circumstances could an empty block be mined "legitimately?"

[aarons6]

EDIT:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=700411.msg11790734#msg11790734 - F2pool/Discus Fish publicly stating that even after SPV mining by chinese pools caused a fork in 2015, they had no intention to stop doing so, and don't believe that Antpool or BTC China will either.  You can see clearly that all 3 pools are still doing it just by looking at the sheer number of empty blocks they mine each week.

I'll stop thread-jacking, but I've got one more question if you would be so kind.  Under what circumstances could an empty block be mined "legitimately?"

none, there is too large of a backlog of transactions to confirm.

the only real circumstance would be if nobody sent any bitcoin for a couple days..

[eleuthria]

EDIT:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=700411.msg11790734#msg11790734 - F2pool/Discus Fish publicly stating that even after SPV mining by chinese pools caused a fork in 2015, they had no intention to stop doing so, and don't believe that Antpool or BTC China will either.  You can see clearly that all 3 pools are still doing it just by looking at the sheer number of empty blocks they mine each week.

I'll stop thread-jacking, but I've got one more question if you would be so kind.  Under what circumstances could an empty block be mined "legitimately?"

A few years ago (I'd say anytime within the last 2 years this wouldn't apply), there were periods of slow network activity (1 tx every few seconds rather than 1-2/sec).  If a pool got really lucky, the following events could happen:

1) Pool pushes out work to a miner that includes all transactions the pool knows about.
2) Miner happens to solve a block almost instantly after receiving this work and sends a winning share back to the pool.
3) Pool verifies the share and pushes out a new block, and has not yet received a single transaction, thus meaning the pool is not aware of a single unconfirmed transaction to include.
4) Pool pushes out new work with no transactions because it isn't aware of any.
5) Pool solves another block before it has sent out updated work with transactions in it.

Those events could only happen if the pool *just* created work and the miner solved it almost instantly, and the two were very low latency from each other.  Obviously, the further back in time you go, the larger the window of opportunity, since transaction activity was significantly lower the further back you go.



Today, there's pretty much only one way a 1-tx block could legitimately happen:

1) Pool restarted its bitcoin node, which wipes out its knowledge of any unconfirmed transactions on the network
2) Pool software created a unit of work before the bitcoin node was notified of a single transaction.
3) Miner solves this unit of work before the pool has sent out new work that includes transactions.


I can't think of any other legitimate reason for a 1-tx block today.  The network is *so* active at all times, that the odds of a pool being able to actually fit every transaction it knows about into a block, sending that work to a miner, and a miner solving that block before the pool has seen a single other transaction, creating a new block without transactions (because there aren't any), and then solving another block off that work, should be a once every few months occurrence  (edit:  and that's a VERY GENEROUS estimate of frequency).  Not a multiple times in a single day occurrence like we see from the SPV mining pools.

Just going from my own evidence:  BTC Guild, as far as I'm aware, did not have a single 1 TX block to its name from mid-2013 until it closed in June 2015.  That includes a multi-month period where it was 35-45% of the network, had multiple chains of 6+ blocks in a row solved by its own bitcoin nodes, and multiple block solves that happened within seconds of each other.  I'm trying to find the data somebody put together of pools with 1-tx blocks, I believe BTC Guild was 3 out of over 32,000 blocks, and I'm fairly certain those blocks were from 2012.

[TracerX]

This is excellent information, I appreciate it and your time! There are some misconceptions regarding how empty blocks come to be and without some general education we won't be able to facilitate change needed to squelch them.

[eleuthria]

This is excellent information, I appreciate it and your time! There are some misconceptions regarding how empty blocks come to be and without some general education we won't be able to facilitate change needed to squelch them.

Finally addendum:  SPV mining isn't the *sole* cause of 1tx blocks.  But it's the main cause of them.  Some pools with poorly made/slow pool software, or slow hardware, might send out a pre-baked work template without any transactions when their node sees a new block because it takes their pool more time to actually build a new block with transaction.  They are still relying on their full node seeing and validating a block, but are shortcutting the time it takes to build work in order to make sure they update to the newest block as fast as possible.

I know BTC Guild and ckpool didn't suffer from this.  That might be because BTC Guild and ckpool used low level (C and C++) languages.  The time difference in building/pushing out work for an empty block and building/pushing out work for a block with 500-900kb of transactions was negligible for BTC Guild.

[jonnybravo0311]

So now the rest of the network has to live with pools that don't do their fucking jobs, causing longer transaction confirmation times, because miners are too stupid to stop mining on pools that are actively hurting the network.

So 100% totally this.  

The real problem is that miners keep right on mining on these pools.  AntPool, F2Pool and company care nothing about the network - they care about lining their pockets.  I created a thread about empty blocks here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1085800.0.  The data is old, but you can see how each pool fares.  Just for fun, here's the data on empty blocks since this past difficulty adjustment:

AntPool - 27 of its 270 blocks have been empty (yes, that's 10%)
F2Pool - 22 of its 341 blocks have been empty (6.45%)
Eligius - 2 of its 25 blocks have been empty (8%)
BW.com - 5 of its 68 blocks have been empty (7.35%)
KnC - 4 of its 96 blocks have been empty (4.17%)
Slush - 3 of its 92 blocks have been empty (3.26%)

All told since last difficulty adjustment, 1459 blocks have been found.  64 of them were empty blocks (4.39%).

[dog1965]

So now the rest of the network has to live with pools that don't do their fucking jobs, causing longer transaction confirmation times, because miners are too stupid to stop mining on pools that are actively hurting the network.

So 100% totally this.  

The real problem is that miners keep right on mining on these pools.  AntPool, F2Pool and company care nothing about the network - they care about lining their pockets.  I created a thread about empty blocks here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1085800.0.  The data is old, but you can see how each pool fares.  Just for fun, here's the data on empty blocks since this past difficulty adjustment:

AntPool - 27 of its 270 blocks have been empty (yes, that's 10%)
F2Pool - 22 of its 341 blocks have been empty (6.45%)
Eligius - 2 of its 25 blocks have been empty (8%)
BW.com - 5 of its 68 blocks have been empty (7.35%)
KnC - 4 of its 96 blocks have been empty (4.17%)
Slush - 3 of its 92 blocks have been empty (3.26%)

All told since last difficulty adjustment, 1459 blocks have been found.  64 of them were empty blocks (4.39%).

who cares as long as you can keep lining your pockets.

[aurel57]

So now the rest of the network has to live with pools that don't do their fucking jobs, causing longer transaction confirmation times, because miners are too stupid to stop mining on pools that are actively hurting the network.

So 100% totally this.  

The real problem is that miners keep right on mining on these pools.  AntPool, F2Pool and company care nothing about the network - they care about lining their pockets.  I created a thread about empty blocks here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1085800.0.  The data is old, but you can see how each pool fares.  Just for fun, here's the data on empty blocks since this past difficulty adjustment:

AntPool - 27 of its 270 blocks have been empty (yes, that's 10%)
F2Pool - 22 of its 341 blocks have been empty (6.45%)
Eligius - 2 of its 25 blocks have been empty (8%)
BW.com - 5 of its 68 blocks have been empty (7.35%)
KnC - 4 of its 96 blocks have been empty (4.17%)
Slush - 3 of its 92 blocks have been empty (3.26%)

All told since last difficulty adjustment, 1459 blocks have been found.  64 of them were empty blocks (4.39%).

I hate to sound so dumb but are these empty block like dead end roads were you have to turn around after traveling down them and go find another route?

[jonnybravo0311]

I hate to sound so dumb but are these empty block like dead end roads were you have to turn around after traveling down them and go find another route?

They are blocks that contain no transactions other than the coinbase one to distribute the 25BTC reward.  So, if you had a transaction waiting for confirmation, it's going to wait until somebody else finds a block.

To use your driving analogy, it's not like heading down a dead end road - it's more like getting to a traffic circle and just spinning around it a few times before heading off in the right direction.

who cares as long as you can keep lining your pockets.

So you wouldn't mind if your paycheck was supposed to be direct deposited into your account, but the bank just decided not to process it.

[aurel57]

I hate to sound so dumb but are these empty block like dead end roads were you have to turn around after traveling down them and go find another route?

They are blocks that contain no transactions other than the coinbase one to distribute the 25BTC reward.  So, if you had a transaction waiting for confirmation, it's going to wait until somebody else finds a block.

To use your driving analogy, it's not like heading down a dead end road - it's more like getting to a traffic circle and just spinning around it a few times before heading off in the right direction.

I see you know my wife... 

[dog1965]

I hate to sound so dumb but are these empty block like dead end roads were you have to turn around after traveling down them and go find another route?

They are blocks that contain no transactions other than the coinbase one to distribute the 25BTC reward.  So, if you had a transaction waiting for confirmation, it's going to wait until somebody else finds a block.

To use your driving analogy, it's not like heading down a dead end road - it's more like getting to a traffic circle and just spinning around it a few times before heading off in the right direction.

who cares as long as you can keep lining your pockets.

So you wouldn't mind if your paycheck was supposed to be direct deposited into your account, but the bank just decided not to process it.

a bank and direct deposit has nothing to do with bitcoin and again as long as there is a 24 hour payout from antpool who cares they pay better than any other pool I tried them all I am tired of trying pools.

prove there is a better pool that supports the network and pays better or just as good and I will use it.


 

[aarons6]

I hate to sound so dumb but are these empty block like dead end roads were you have to turn around after traveling down them and go find another route?

They are blocks that contain no transactions other than the coinbase one to distribute the 25BTC reward.  So, if you had a transaction waiting for confirmation, it's going to wait until somebody else finds a block.

To use your driving analogy, it's not like heading down a dead end road - it's more like getting to a traffic circle and just spinning around it a few times before heading off in the right direction.

who cares as long as you can keep lining your pockets.

So you wouldn't mind if your paycheck was supposed to be direct deposited into your account, but the bank just decided not to process it.

a bank and direct deposit has nothing to do with bitcoin and again as long as there is a 24 hour payout from antpool or f2pool who cares they pay better than any other pool I tried them all I am tired of trying pools.

prove there is a better pool that supports the network and pays better or just as good and I will use it.


 

lol its been proven many times but you ignore the facts.. f2pool is the LEAST paying pool there is.. with the 4% fee based on 100% PPS you lose from the very start..