Topic: [4+ EH] Slush Pool (slushpool.com); Overt AsicBoost; World First Mining Pool - page 375. (Read 4382813 times)

... I've done a lot of searching and come to the conclusion that nowhere is the appropriate server and port and an effective date listed.  I've tried stratum.bitcoin.cz and api.bitcoin.cz and ports 3333 and 3332 but the upshot is still the same. Am I using the wrong settings?

3. Run miner

Run your own GPU/FPGA/ASIC miner with the worker credentials you gave earlier, and connect it to following URL:
http://api.bitcoin.cz:8332
(Main pool URL)

or
stratum.bitcoin.cz:3333
(If you have Stratum-compatible miner)

This is called Gambler's fallacy. In reality for truly random process "bad luck" does not imply "good luck in the future". Even if you toss the coin and wait for 10 heads in a row then the next toss would be equally likely head as tail. There is nothing like "after 10 red in a row in roulette there must be more black than red". The ratio should approach probability, but the difference between "good" and "bad" does not go to zero.

Before I get started, was the 2 second block invalid because it lost an orphan race or because it was invalid for some other reason? And was it two seconds after the last solved block for the network or for the pool?

I am curious what effect it could or would have to start mining in a pool after it shows a luck rating of below 80% long term (Monthly), and 60% short term (1 week).

I know this method is used extensively in stock trades. They call it the RSI or Relative Strength Index.

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rsi.asp

Time and price movements are not random, as say hashing is. Luck can be relative, just as Relative Strength is.

Though it is possible to have permanently bad or low luck, it can not happen in nature over extremely long periods of times.

Yes you can flip "Heads" on a coin 100 times in a row, but if starting at toss #1 the laws of probability will prove out in the long run. Aberrations are just "Variance" of the longer term averages.

This can be used to a miners advantage.

If you only start mining on a pool when it has short term (1 to 2 Weeks) luck below  say 60 and switch to Pay Per Share when the pool luck goes above say 120, how would this affect the long term earnings of a miner?

Because just as Bad Luck, never lasts, so to Good Luck can also not last.

Unfortunately my college math skills have long been forgotten.

Shortest I ever seen was block 239570 found by slush on 2013-06-03 in just 2 seconds. Unfortunately it was invalid for us...

Thanks for the vote of confidence guys, but I'm having trouble following the question and answers. Can someone boil post a precis of the question?

Thanks for the vote of confidence guys, but I'm having trouble following the question and answers. Can someone boil post a precis of the question?

Thanks for the vote of confidence guys, but I'm having trouble following the question and answers. Can someone boil post a precis of the question?

Shortest I ever seen was block 239570 found by slush on 2013-06-03 in just 2 seconds. Unfortunately it was invalid for us...

OOC is the man, he will elucidate....

Good point - the odds still work out at around 1 in 1000000, but as Terry Pratchett once wrote, million-to-one chances happen nine times out of ten.

I still wonder if the contents of some blocks can make the difficulty vary significantly from the assigned difficulty though. Perhaps there is a weakness in (double) SHA256 where hash collisions are more likely with certain values?
Maybe OrganOfCorti can help us out on this one? Any crypto experts around? Where's Bruce Sterling when you need him...

By extremely short blocks, you can't account for mean orphan probability. By a two-second block, probability of orphan race is extremely high, near to 100% IMHO, as the time differences between the good and the orphaned block normally are of the same size as is the block duration by a 2-second block. So I think you must leave out your "60" multiplier.

I would have thought that the probability of two people finding a sub 2-second block, at the same time would be the probability of one finding it, squared.
Assuming the block difficulty is correct, at the moment, we are on block 288579. 
I don't know how many 2 -second blocks there have been so to make the numbers easier, lets guess at around 300, which makes the odds of a given block being less than 2 seconds around 1 in 1000, or 0.001.
From the statistics on blockchain.info, it looks like there are around 2.5 orphaned blocks per day. The total number of blocks each day is tuned to be 144 (one every ten minutes), so dividing this by 2.5 gives around 60, or a 1 in 60 chance of there being such a collision on a given block.
if my maths is right, this means there is a a 1 in 1000 chance of each participant hitting a 2 second block, so multiply these together to get 1 in 1000000, and there is a 1 in 60 chance of there being a collision in this way, so the odds of this happening would be roughly 1 in sixty million. To put this in perspective, you have a 1 in 600000 chance of being struck by lightning, and this would appear to be some 100 times less likely!

Now, further up there, I made an assumption - that the block difficulty is 'correct'. As I understand it, the block difficulty essentially defines how many leading zeroes must be in a block's hash for it to be considered 'solved'. For example, the last block (found by us!) had a hash of 0000000000000000d69d39dbe4e025909fc30b4be52abfaccfec9315c497ac6c, the digits after the leading zeroes are irrelevant (which is what leads to block collisions in the first place, as two hashes can be found with the same number of leading zeroes).
The block itself is composed of the newly found hash, the hash from the previous block, the block number, difficulty and time, the pool's address, and all the transactions in that block (this is a simplified description), so my question is this - since the odds of two pools finding a 2 second block at the same time is so low (and I stick by 'vanishingly small' as a good description), is it possible that some blocks have more 'solutions' than are statistically expected - in other words, for some blocks, are there more solutions than expected with that number of leading zeroes?
For example, the hash above has 16 leading zeroes, in binary this is 128 leading zeroes, so if my understanding is correct, the odds of getting this out of any random hash would be 2^128.
Any thoughts?

If you look at a blockchain record, you will see that there are two time stamps: the time the block was found, as recorded by the finder, and the time it was reported to the blockchain, which is the one that counts (but see the next paragraph).  When a block is solved by two miners almost simultaneously, it can (and does) happen that the first finder loses out through being too slow in reporting their success, which may be caused by their own internal issues or by a delay in the internet.  It appears to happen to most pools sooner or later.  Since everybody will continue to work on a block until the new find has been logged and propagated across the network, occasional duplicates are inevitable.

There is a rare complication: if the miner who loses the race happens to solve and report a second block before the first result has been propagated, his blocks will form the new chain by having the longer fork, and the poor sod who got there first loses out.  This could happen by accident; if intentional - which is theoretically possible - it's called "selfish mining".

Thanks for that - good explanation with solid math.
My following query would be - if 2 blocks are found "at the same time" - how is the block owner\solver determined?
If its exact time as suggested earlier then why would 2 miners think they had solved it ?