I'm going to have to go out on a limb here and just say that I feel there is something shady going on with this whole operation. Based on the numbers, it would be silly to refuse such a hefty bounty for releasing this to the open source community.
Lets take a look and lets say there are 5,000 LX150s miners out there, and lets say 40% of them run the TML software. I have a feeling that this number is much lower, but, I don't know for sure. (Anyone have these numbers?)
Assuming trends continue and such to extrapolate this estimate, it would take at least a year to generate 700 BTC in profit from commissions at that rate, not counting the costs of running the "signcryption" servers and other operating expenses (time, effort...).
Now also, lets look at the fact that there are many competing technologies and other factors emerging soon that can potentially (many which absolutely will) impact profitability on a commission based project like this:
- Reward halving - 100% chance it will happen - Halves potential profit starting sometime in the next two months
- Competing bitstream - Very very likely - A competing non-commission bitstream which doesn't require the use of proprietary software and servers is released, squashing profit to zero because there is no point in the signcryption overhead
- ASICs - Semi-likely, first on everyone's mind (Personally dont buy it, but...) - Potentially for significant difficulty increase, ie much less profit
- DDoS attacks, network problems, etc - Possible - Signcryption becomes unusable by customers for whatever reason, putting their faith in more stable implementations
- Signcryption hacked - Possible - Lets face it, the LX150 is crammed with just the hashers. Adding any *real* and *strong* encryption just shouldn't be possible with the space constraints. The signcryption is likely a kludge that will be broken given enough effort. And lets face it, you're not going to win any copyright lawsuits against anonymous hackers.
- Many more I'm not thinking of at the moment...
So, given all these reasons and more, the logical thing to do would be to accept the bounties and be done with the whole deal while it is on the table, saving over a year of time waiting on commissions under a perfect no problems scenario, which is unlikely.
I can pretty much guarantee that at least one of the above items (including reward halving, which is definite) will happen before you reach 700 BTC in commission profits.
NOW, all of that said, it should be obvious that any sane developer would accept the bounty. Why would this particular developer potentially not accept this given all of these obstacles?
I can think of a few possible reasons... and I will note that I have not confirmed any of these in any way and they are all simply speculation:
- The core uses code that would violate copyrights if revealed - This is probably the most likely. It would also mean that the bitstream is already in violation of that copyright just that no one is able to tell without the source code.
- The core does things in addition to what is advertised - It is entirely possible (since all work is fed through TMLs servers) that data in addition to work is being sent/received by the core. It is entirely possible that TML is *already* collecting "commission" on the use of the core and mining software without anyone knowing by sneaking additional work in via the "signcryption" to either another hashing ring or mixing it in with part of the others. This would be far more profitable than the actual commission structure publicly outlined, and impressive since it would mean that the cores are actually faster than advertised.
- The signcryption is a kludge - Its possible (and likely) that the actual encryption in the core is very weak. Since hashing at these speeds will take up a good majority of the chip's physical space it would be near impossible to put any strong encryption into the core along with the hashers. I'm going to say that it is very unlikely that the encryption is implemented as described, "interwoven into the actual hashing core" since modifying the SHA256 approach would be futile, since the core itself needs to know if the hash beats the target difficulty BEFORE it is encrypted in any way.
In any case, this is likely because releasing this in source code form would hurt reputation, since its not nearly as effective as claimed. - Many more, but, lots of speculation here.
Any of the above are possible since this is closed source code that is running on these chips. You literally have NO IDEA what it could be doing. (I personally will not be running any TML software on my chips/PCs for this reason, not counting the lack of failover/stability).
Now, lets say that that any of the above are true. Then releasing the code as it stands would be a bad thing for TML. HOWEVER, aside from the copyright issue, the others could easily be solved by removing useless code. We don't need to know nor care how the signcryption works. We don't need to know that there was code in the core designed to shift more hashing power to TML than intented, or any other potentially shady code. Strip that out, release the code, you get paid, everyone is happy.
So, all in all, there is no legitimate reason I can come up with for the core not to be open sourced if it is in fact legitimate to begin with. There is far more to gain from the bounty.
I also will put out there that if no other bitstream is released to rival TML soon (next few months, I'd say, tops), I will make it a point to shift efforts into perfecting my personal bitstream and ensure it's release well before TML could make more profit than the offered bounties.
All of that said, I hope people have a better understanding of this entire situation, and I hope that TML will reconsider their stance on declining the offered bounties.
-wk
