Topic: Eligius pool is back under the new name Ocean - page 3. (Read 2424 times)

In the sense that there were many farms and data centers under curtailment.

In what sense?

Weather in the US playing a huge factor in the decline in hashrate across many pools.

Some odd fluctuations in the pool's hashrate seem to be taking place, seems like some of the larger miners are probably dictating that.


After the pool peaked at 1 Eh/s a lot of hash power went out, some other went in.
Some facilities might be having issues, other miners might be doing testing...
Who knows. But I still speculate that eventually more hash power will settle in ocean pool as more miners realize that in the long run the TIDES payment structure is more profitable than PPLNS.

On the other hand, the pool also doesn't punish pool hopping, so we'll probably keep seeing noticable changes in it's total hash power till more miners of a larger scale settle in it.

Probably a good time to get in more shares as part of the pie now in case a block is found now if you're a miner though

Interestingly some big miners have hopped onto OCEAN.
The pool briefly reached above 1 exahash yesterday. I am not sure what the logistics and thought process of moving hashrate are but probably the pool is going to keep growing its hashrate if things continue like this.
Miners moving some of their hash temporarily are probably comparing their rewards to PPLNS pools and realizing that they're earning more on OCEAN, then moving their full hashrate on the pool.

Actually most big miners that are on OCEAN had a test run at first. It's interesting that this can be observed through their history on the pool.

To keep from going off topic here, refer to post #1 in the Kanopool thread You can post your questions there and he will be sure to reply. Also has a Discord channel. See https://kano.is/ for the Discord invite for better access to the channel.

In short - it has several nodes spread around the world and fastest possible connections to the BTC network.

@kano
As it's difficult to have a direct contact with a pool owner , can i ask if your node's connections are random or are you mostly ( or fully ) connected to other pools ? It's something i'd like to ask for a long time , it will help me understand if how i think network works is correct on not . Thank you in advance .

See Bitcoin block data available in CSV format, and combine for instance time.txt with weight.txt.

Correct!


Is it safe to assume that block timestamps are likely set into the future, I don't know exactly how pools handle the timestamp but judging by the(MPT) rule it's safer for a miner to write block timestamp slightly into future , in case the previous blocks were pushed into future which would invalidate their blocks,  it also gives miners an advantage of having a lower difficulty adjustment (nothing much, below 1% indeed if they all pushed the blocktime into the future), plus getting a wider nonce range without having to alter the Merkle root.?

exactly that the time stamp does not match the real time.

The block timestamp is set by the pool when it sends work to the miner.
Some miners can also increment the timestamp - but it is not when the block was found.

time stamps are off.

I have seen block xxx10 at 10:00:01. and block xxx11 at 9:59:59

a later block arrived first. no shit timestamp info

this may have been corrected ,but it is was possible at one time.

I have seen antpool do back to back to back blocks  with seconds apart.

As they had a short cut method that made rewards quicker .

You have to add two rules to the analogy
- the bird will only fall after the last buss has left the station
- the bird will not fall unless the driver has already started his engine  
The last one is tricky because in the analogy the driver just spends gas while in the mining scenario it can actually profit.


Those fees are driving us all crazy that we started to think it empty blocks are a thing of past eras but no, the mempool was empty for at least a few seconds during last springs, not full blocks were quite common and there were some moments when indeed it was empty, of course not for more than a few seconds probably till the next tx came but it still did happen.


I know that timestamps are really tricky, but is there a way to find out the smallest interval two full blocks have been found even with approximation?
Viabtc, f2pool offer the data to the seconds but crawling that seems like a pain in the ass and I don't think it's worth the effort.

I wonder how this will be affected by Ordinals transactions now setting their fees en masse to 20 to 30 sats per byte. This will put them below the legitimate transactions since the average fee always seems to be a bit higher, but it does guarantee that miners will always have a base fee rate for its blocks, given that these transactions now take up almost 200vMB.

I have been getting 120% to 140% for a block for 40 days in a row .  say 7.2 to 8.4 coins a block.  If this pool gives 7 to 8 coins vs 7.2 to 8.4 it will not get a big player.

This would be true if they had the chance to include transactions and chose not to, but this isn't the case, and probably will never be the case for any pool out there, every pool on the planet mines empty blocks except for Kano and CK, maybe a few more here and there, it would be very hard to prove that x pool intentionally mined an empty block while they had the chances to include transactions, I believe antpool did it around the blocksize debate and the forks, but it's not something you could take to court, they can just claim they had a bug in their software and they were not able to create a block templet with transactions.

However, Ocean pool is at risk of dying on its own if the Ordinal wave continues and its clients see that they are missing out on some good profit just because Luke decided to ban/censor ordinal transactions, this theory holds true assuming all of their clients do know and understand how mining fees work, but then seeing a pool like Antpool that provides PPLNS for 0% while keeping 100% of the transaction fees still has users mining on their PPLNS -- it simply proves that many people are just stupid. if Ocean attracts the same type of people, those people won't even care to check if they are making less and will continue to run on Ocean.

Of course, this is good for everybody else who uses a pool that doesn't ban ordinals, every sat of fee that Ocean leaves on the table is going to be taken by someone else, I'd rather see stupid people mine on Ocean than see them mine on antpool PPLNS, since they are going to lose money anyway, it's better to lose it the other miners and not to Bitmain.

Pools hitting zero fee blocks due to censoring tx's are going to face class action lawsuit possibilities maybe not now maybe not after 2024 ½ ing but by 2028 the  1.5625 block hit reward will often be lower than the fees. So deliberately reducing fees to hit a block quickly (antpool trick) more so than a censorship trick like Ocean is doing is going to face a lawsuit.

Yeah I know it is off in the future but it will happen. Maybe Ocean won't for doing it to ordinals but he needs to be wary.

It is not very rare, it is more like impossible, mempool has not been empty for years, not for a single moment.

Please point what is not right about it.

But that is not why they mined an empty block, it is not like they had no other transactions to include, nor the censorship of ordinals makes block template handling slower, their Knots nodes could be slower than core, but i wouldn't imagine a huge difference.



In his tweet he talks about a fee seconds, about 6 seconds difference between receiving the block and propagating his own, so ya certainly longer than Kano's.

Humorous analogy but not right.
Mining empty blocks has *always* been allowed for 1 main reason: to maintain the 10min avg time between blocks for the (now) rare occasions that the mempool is empty meaning there are literally no transactions to process for too long of a time. In the very early days that was almost common, but these days is VERY rare but still does happen.

Speaking of mempool...
If you checkout https://mempool.space/ you will see *all* of the upcoming tx's in the que and what the expected composition of the block should be based on its profitability (fees paid). Note that while there is no one global mempool: every node on the network maintains its own mempool, so different nodes may hold different transactions in their mempools, ALL pools can also see that information and at least in the case of Kanopool have already selected what tx's they will use and have that data cached for use when a new block-found msg is broadcast to the network. The 1st cached data includes (or should include) the id of the previous block found to propagate the chain. It's how Ocean pre-scans ((or should be pre-scanning) the tx's that they will use in the change of work sent when they see a new block.

Difference is Ocean chooses to not include any tx's related to ordinals whereas Kanopool and all the others accept all of them so scheduling the tx's is easy

@alani123, you said and use that as a reason to mine an empty block. Kano has repeatedly said here that the time for his pool to generate and broadcast new work to all the miners is under 100ms + time needed for the data packets to reach the miners (ping time). I'd think that for most other pools it should be about the same.

Um, for whatever reason(s) Luke's original Eligius pool software was exceeding slow at processing new work and because of that yes even back then he was doing empty blocks. As he has always been censoring tx's (back then casinos) methinks that possibly Ocean has the same issues for the same reason(s)?

Well, if all nodes decide they would reject empty blocks, that would take care of it without a fork, however, this would achieve nothing, say I own a pool and I want to deliberately mine empty blocks, I would simply include only my own made up transactions and wala! my blocks are no longer empty and you will have to accept them.


Honestly speaking, I wouldn't call this a "waste of blocks." This could turn into a chicken-egg debate. But if you think about it, empty blocks do not have an impact on the chances or speed of your transaction getting confirmed as long as they are not excluded intentionally. Your transaction will always be mined in the next block that includes transactions.

We need to make sure that everybody understands that it was not possible for Ocean to pause that block, include transactions, and then transact it. That block was found empty, and it can't be changed. If Ocean would not propagate or even find that block, none of the pending transactions would have been confirmed anyway. It would only lead to Ocean losing a whole block for nothing good "except avoiding the risk of building on an invalid blockchain." But again, we don't know if they did validate the previous block's transactions or not—it's something we can't know. They can't prove, and thus it's always possible to accuse them of not validating, and they would have no way to prove you wrong.

I really feel like the above needs a lot more explanation for the average person to understand how empty blocks are not a waste of transaction space. Since many of you here know I like to use some weird analogies, let me use the same bus analogy to try and explain the empty block situation.

Imagine a bus station where people are lining up waiting to be picked up (transactions in mempool). The normal behavior would be many buses waiting at the bus station with their doors open and the crowd of people are lining up (not knowing which bus is going to let them in). None of these buses are allowed to drive unless a pink bird falls on their front glass. When the bird falls, the bus driver or his assistant already know what people they are going to bring in because they sat there long enough to see who has a valid ticket and how much each of them is willing to pay for the seat.

So when the bus drives away, the other buses would now need to see which people took off on that bus so that they can exclude their names from the calling list, or else the next checkpoint would stop the bus and kill the bus driver because his list contains a person's name that isn't on the bus (mining pools clearing their mempool and removing the transactions that were already included in the previous block).

So as long as the time intervals between pink birds falling on a random bus's front glass are long enough, the bus driver will always have the time to entrain those people, and it's all working fine because on average it takes 10 mins for a pink bird to fall, which is enough time for the old bus driver to handle his passenger list. But sometimes, a pink bird would fall into one of the buses right after another pink bird had fallen. So the bus driver doesn't even know which passengers the previous bus took, and he needs to hit the pedal immediately before one of two things happen that would make him lose the ride.

A- Another pink bird falls into another bus (someone else finding a block to propagate it).
B- The pink bird falls on the ground because of gravity (the pool simply didn't propagate the block, threw it away and waited for another block).

The bus driver here would throw away his pen and paper, close his door, and hit the pedal as fast as he can, and the police checkpoint would let him through because he has no list at all (empty blocks are allowed while blocks that contain invalid transactions are not).

Now you can imagine that your transaction is a person sitting in that bus station. Had the second bus driver chosen not to drive away, it doesn't mean he would be able to take you in because, remember, he needs to prepare his list before the pink bird makes it to his front glass. It's not like he could let you in and he chose not to. He had only two options (drive empty or don't drive at all), which means (mine an empty block or don't mine at all). So to you as a person waiting in the bus station, that bus isn't wasted; it just happened.

Of course, doing so means the second bus is now at risk of reaching that checkpoint only to find that the bus driver before him was shot dead by the police because there is something wrong in his list. He looks in the rearview mirror (right before he is shot dead too) and finds another bus behind him who would also be stopped and killed. Lol, of course, while that isn't the end of the world, it simply means that you contributed to misleading the limited number of buses into taking the wrong route. And now the legit buses are fewer in number, and thus those poor people have to wait even longer because of your greedy behavior, not to mention all the misery you created at the bus station.