Vertcoin - 1 | ASIC - 0 | Lyra2RE | Decentralised | GPU Mineable | Open Source

[LieTOme]

VTC for future , dont waste your time for invest on another coin , in here you can get all

[Mathgamain]

VTC the iron coin

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron

[etoque]

vtc will meet moon again or what? I've take some just in case...

[bathrobehero]

I was just checking how this coin was doing and it went from this:

Block distribution - Remember to spread hashrate!

to this:

[TheCoinFinder]

I was just checking how this coin was doing and it went from this:

What pool is that on? Because looking at the live blocks.. .that doesn't seem to be the case. You're most likely looking at the wrong fork

[bathrobehero]

I was just checking how this coin was doing and it went from this:

What pool is that on? Because looking at the live blocks.. .that doesn't seem to be the case. You're most likely looking at the wrong fork

https://www.ipominer.com/stats?curr=vtc

[TheCoinFinder]

I was just checking how this coin was doing and it went from this:

What pool is that on? Because looking at the live blocks.. .that doesn't seem to be the case. You're most likely looking at the wrong fork

https://www.ipominer.com/stats?curr=vtc

Fair enough. They won't show in the block stats because each block is sent to a new VTC address (annoyingly)

[bathrobehero]

I was just checking how this coin was doing and it went from this:

What pool is that on? Because looking at the live blocks.. .that doesn't seem to be the case. You're most likely looking at the wrong fork

https://www.ipominer.com/stats?curr=vtc

Fair enough. They won't show in the block stats because each block is sent to a new VTC address (annoyingly)

So if this is legit, then 1 user is having close to 70% of the network hashrate daily mining ~15 BTC worth of coins. That is either thousands of GPUs or FPGAs even with 200-300% faster private miners. Or ASICs or an exploit. Either way, it's ugly.

[TheCoinFinder]

So if this is legit, then 1 user is having close to 70% of the network hashrate daily mining ~15 BTC worth of coins. That is either thousands of GPUs or FPGAs even with 200-300% faster private miners. Or ASICs or an exploit. Either way, it's ugly.

It looks legit (real blockchain, and hes getting all blocks so its not a fake shares thing).

It may be worth reaching out to IPOMiner to see if they have any contact details.

Also, it makes no sense why you would use them when they charge a massive 3% FEE. You could just solo mine with that speed

[elbandi]

I was just checking how this coin was doing and it went from this:

What pool is that on? Because looking at the live blocks.. .that doesn't seem to be the case. You're most likely looking at the wrong fork

https://www.ipominer.com/stats?curr=vtc

wow, that's ~6000-7000 vga (r9 290x). or botnet... 

[Starin]

I was just checking how this coin was doing and it went from this:

What pool is that on? Because looking at the live blocks.. .that doesn't seem to be the case. You're most likely looking at the wrong fork

https://www.ipominer.com/stats?curr=vtc

wow, that's ~6000-7000 vga (r9 290x). or botnet... 

I hardly think they are GPU. They are most probably FPGAs... As in X11 It is most likely that people already made FPGAs but not intend to share them. Well, that is pretty understandable as I wouldn't too.
Last month a local investor told me that he has 50.000 $ ready to invest in a mining farm. I suggested him to use the money for a developer to create X algorithm fpgas or even asics...

[bathrobehero]

I was just checking how this coin was doing and it went from this:

What pool is that on? Because looking at the live blocks.. .that doesn't seem to be the case. You're most likely looking at the wrong fork

https://www.ipominer.com/stats?curr=vtc

wow, that's ~6000-7000 vga (r9 290x). or botnet...  

I doubt it's a botnet, you'd need a shitton more computers to achieve that hashrate.

Considering Lyra2RE is all about memory access (afaik) and that there are FPGA'd with GPU level memory bandwidth I'm thinking highly optimized FPGAs:

The FPGA-to-memory bandwidth is measured as 64.5 GB/s in total

[MaxDZ8]

So if this is legit, then 1 user is having close to 70% of the network hashrate daily mining ~15 BTC worth of coins. That is either thousands of GPUs or FPGAs even with 200-300% faster private miners. Or ASICs or an exploit. Either way, it's ugly.

The currently available Lyra2RE kernel runs at about ~1% GPU efficiency. The authors themselves wrote on their paper
(note that I had to copy this by hand as the authors are douchebags and didn't let me copy paste from the pdf)

• 60: such performance penalty is most likely due to latency ... since GPUs are optimized for delivering high throughput rather than low latency.
  This is false in general. GPUs have worked on hiding latency since bumpy-shiny shader was demonstrated back on NV10 days.
• 60: in practice they later elaborate on it by writing
  latency ... can usually be masked by the GPU ...
• 61: ... the throughput provided in our tests is still 4.5 times lower than ... CPU
  Only? It should be at least double digits.
• 61: confirming again they cut it short
  ... hindering an attacker's ability to take full advantage of ... latency hiding capabilities of commercial GPUs.

There was also another statement about latency, very indicative. But due to the PDF being full of rubbish I haven't been able to find it.

You know the drill. GPUs right now are slower... but not even all that much. And they're running at 1%. The private miner could as well be 10x-20x (1000%).

Your observations about FPGA bandwidth is correct but your conclusion is not. That bandwidth is peak and most likely block write/read.

[bathrobehero]

So if this is legit, then 1 user is having close to 70% of the network hashrate daily mining ~15 BTC worth of coins. That is either thousands of GPUs or FPGAs even with 200-300% faster private miners. Or ASICs or an exploit. Either way, it's ugly.

The currently available Lyra2RE kernel runs at about ~1% GPU efficiency. The authors themselves wrote on their paper
(note that I had to copy this by hand as the authors are douchebags and didn't let me copy paste from the pdf)

• 60: such performance penalty is most likely due to latency ... since GPUs are optimized for delivering high throughput rather than low latency.
  This is false in general. GPUs have worked on hiding latency since bumpy-shiny shader was demonstrated back on NV10 days.
• 60: in practice they later elaborate on it by writing
  latency ... can usually be masked by the GPU ...
• 61: ... the throughput provided in our tests is still 4.5 times lower than ... CPU
  Only? It should be at least double digits.
• 61: confirming again they cut it short
  ... hindering an attacker's ability to take full advantage of ... latency hiding capabilities of commercial GPUs.

There was also another statement about latency, very indicative. But due to the PDF being full of rubbish I haven't been able to find it.

You know the drill. GPUs right now are slower... but not even all that much. And they're running at 1%. The private miner could as well be 10x-20x (1000%).

Your observations about FPGA bandwidth is correct but your conclusion is not. That bandwidth is peak and most likely block write/read.

That's disappointing but thanks.

[jwinterm]

Sooooooooo...hard fork?

[ipominer]

ipoMiner has been the largest VTC pool since early February, and our percentage of hashrate has been steadily growing since then. We've had both small and large miners mining Vertcoin with us since then, and we're excited to see VTC regaining popularity and more widespread interest in the past few weeks.

Of course, we want to support and encourage VTC as much as possible. Having a single pool with large hashrate isn't actually a direct problem, but it does create concerns over 51% attacks. To help encourage diversification of mining hashrate on the network, I've notified all the Vertcoin miners at ipoMiner that the VTC ports will be shut down within the next 48 hours.

[bathrobehero]

ipoMiner has been the largest VTC pool since early February, and our percentage of hashrate has been steadily growing since then. We've had both small and large miners mining Vertcoin with us since then, and we're excited to see VTC regaining popularity and more widespread interest in the past few weeks.

Of course, we want to support and encourage VTC as much as possible. Having a single pool with large hashrate isn't actually a direct problem, but it does create concerns over 51% attacks. To help encourage diversification of mining hashrate on the network, I've notified all the Vertcoin miners at ipoMiner that the VTC ports will be shut down within the next 48 hours.

That's admirable but I don't think that's necessary. The problem is not with your pool, it's the fact that one user single handedly having ~70% of the network hashrate.
If anything, your pool helped uncover the issue.

[ipominer]

That's admirable but I don't think that's necessary. The problem is not with your pool, it's the fact that one user single handedly having ~70% of the network hashrate.
If anything, your pool helped uncover the issue.

From what I understand, there isn't "one user", but more of a consortium of miners in a pool. It's been interesting to watch that coincide with the price increases lately in the coin. Both of which have been encouraging to see, from my perspective, after watching VTC stagnate for a while.

I'm just hoping to help spur some diversification on the network with this move. Being a large pool for a single coin isn't really ipoMiner's mission, anyway.

[bathrobehero]

From what I understand, there isn't "one user", but more of a consortium of miners in a pool.

There is one user and he hovered as high as 11 gh/s out of 15 gh/s nethashrate, but of course now only you can see it.

He's also the top hasher on your FTC, START and ZRC pools where he owns ~52%, ~13% and ~3.5% of each coin's network hashrate at the time of writing:

https://www.ipominer.com/stats?curr=ftc
https://www.ipominer.com/stats?curr=start
https://www.ipominer.com/stats?curr=zrc

Kind of both amazing and scary.

[elbandi]

Of course, we want to support and encourage VTC as much as possible. Having a single pool with large hashrate isn't actually a direct problem, but it does create concerns over 51% attacks. To help encourage diversification of mining hashrate on the network, I've notified all the Vertcoin miners at ipoMiner that the VTC ports will be shut down within the next 48 hours.

In this situation, that was a bad idea.

Normally if a pool has a large hashrate, he stops the pool, and large hashrate divide to other pools, and everythings will be good.
But here, the large hashrate made by one user. he will not split his hashpower to other pools, but he will move the all his power together to somewhere other pool (than that pool will have >50% hashrate) or move to solo mine. this last is worse than he mine in a pool, because a titled pool won't do a double spend (or he will lost this reputation!).

So now, we have a 10G hashpower somewhere, but we dont know where, and we dont know what he is doing.