Topic: [ANN][POOL] ipoMiner - Profitable multipool targeting new coins + merged mining! - page 9. (Read 366289 times)

I see 2 solutions to that right off the bat.
1) change TOS to reflect that username & hashrate will be publicly viewable.
2) change your code to give user the option of hashrate being public with default setting of anonymous.

A majority of pools go with #2.    I have no problem with my hashrate being public. 


Now as for PUP; any program, especially a cpu miner, that is installed w/o end user being informed that it is a condition of use of main program; is treated as malware by most computer security personnel. 

To say what Danila is doing is not a bot may be legally true, but it's splitting a fine hair.


There's a saying: if it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck, it must be duck.

That's completely untrue. We actively ban botnets regularly -- they are against our terms of use. What's being discussed here is not a botnet by any common legal or technical definition -- it's mining via bundled software. Disclosed bundling of software is a valid, industry standard practice which generates revenue for software developers, distributors, and publishers. We're certainly not going to ban a user over a legitimate activity.

Privacy concerns were raised by more than half a dozen ipoMiner users about showing hashrate by username, because of people posting screenshots on bitcointalk and reddit with users information, so we took action to change that.

To answer your question, it's true.  There is a botnet mining vtc on Ipominer and owns 70% of the network hashrate.  Once this was discovered Ipominer said they would close the port.  The botnet owner contacted Ipominer and complained of a privacy issue.  Subsequently Ipominer stated they will not close the port and they now hide all user stats to prevent others from investigating.  Obviously this is a pretty substantial revenue stream for them.

So if you're a botnet owner, ipominer is the best place for you to mine. 

Right. Using a form of numeric id (sid, uid, whatever term you prefer) is something I've considered, instead of usernames for stats. There's fairly substantial code changes needed to implement that, so its will take a bit of time to consider the options and devise the appropriate implementation.

Well I agree that there is nothing actually useful from seeing other user names but I sort of liked being able to see how often I was finding blocks in the block list.  I also liked being able to see how many other miners were mining a coin and their hashrate.  If it simply said:
AnonymousMiner1 xxx hashrate
AnonymousMiner2 xxx hashrate
you (meaning me) xxx hashrate
AnonymousMiner4 xxx hashrate

that would be fine with me.  I do see that I can still see the pool hashrate on the coin but it was easier to look at the list and get an idea if a lot of people were mining it and if any heavy hitters were on it.  Especially with new or kind of obscure coins, lots of people and people bringing leased hashrate brings a little more confidence that the coins is worth mining.  May be just psychological since any coin can tank but I liked that setup.

I used to mine on mmpool and they use a sort of SID for each miner.  They show all stats but you basically have to look at your individual stats and compare them to the list to see what your own SID is.  But your SID never changes either so once you get used to recognizing it you can see where you sit in the list.

http://mmpool.org/statistics

If you were logged in and mining you could see your own stats at the top but you can go look and see exactly what I mean anyway.  It shows everyone's stats and also shows who the block finders are in the block list.

A few people contacted me, concerned that their hashrate by username were publicly accessible. (As screenshots were being posted with them.)

On review, I can't come up with a good argument of why they should be. Seeing hashrate by username for other miners isn't actually useful beyond "interesting", and there's certainly a valid point that some people don't appreciate the lack of privacy. I'm trying to figure out a good middle approach, which includes the usual option that pools give to appear 'anonymous' in hashrate reporting.

Is that true?  Did you change the stats display to hide evidence of bot nets?  I came here to see if there was anything about why the stats were changed (they were certainly better before) but if this is about making it harder to spot a potential bot net from other miners that's pretty lame.  

So it is not Danila anymore, now it is anonymous.

And I can see you changed your stats display, so it is not so easy to see it.

Exactly right.

Sorry to "disturb" ... but as a pool owner I know what it means when suddenly bot nets "knock on your stratum" and miners try to make a quick buck by having hundreds (or thousands) of pc's "mining" at your pool. Its not only very resource consuming, its also very problematic for legal reasons. I had a botnet mining ZRC some time back when there was no GPU miner and my hoster almost shutdown ALL (!) my servers because they thought I was behind that botnet and my pool was a C&C server .. I was lucky and a friendly guy from tech department called me before they wanted to "flip that switch" so I could explain to them what was going on...

So you really don't want a botnet mining at your pool. Of course there are "smart" botnet miners which proxy their bots/zombies and there is not much you can do about it because you simply cannot separate them from the legit miners.

Clearly as a pool we do not condone botnets, as discussed in our terms of use. What we were discussing in the Vertcoin thread is not about a botnet, as my reply there indicated.

Botnet
a network of private computers infected with malicious software and controlled as a group without the owners' knowledge.


The miner is malicious (it is not serving any purpose for the owner of the PC, they do not receive even one satoshi of reward in return). Controlled as a group - by Danila (who is running 149 miners on ipominer) - and without the owners' knowledge as there is no justifiable reason why someone would allow someone to mine without any recompense on their hardware willingly.

So ipominer supports and therefore profits off Botnets.

Danila was also top miner of various other coins on ipominer. Regardless of the morality of this, there is one fact to obtain from all this:

As Ipominer supports botnets, thereby potentially depriving all the other miners on every network of every coin that they host.

Of course it wouldn't stop botnets from existing, but its a damn site easier to profit when you have a multipool setup that is botnet friendly.

Its one thing to notice a botnet on a pool and be unsure how to remove it/try to do something about it.

Its another to condone it.

See my reply on the Vertcoin thread, here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.11687551

I wonder how many "workers" Danila has on VTC pool. If it is in the thousands - it is a botnet most likely, if it is less than 100 then probably Lyra2Re FPGA is developed.

Raising fees on a coin to encourage distribution of hashrate only works when there are a large number of individual miners on a coin -- which wasn't applicable in this case.

Actually, it has the potential to do more than you might think, because there's absolutely no other single VTC pool that can physically support that mining on their infrastructure. That's why they were mining here -- we're very well optimized. That said, There's unfortunately only so much I can do from the pool's standpoint -- shutting it off and encouraging hashrate to spread are the only two real options, and are what I'm doing.

I don't understand how stopping ipominer's VTC pool solves the VTC network concentration problem, since 99.9% of ipominer VTC hash power has been ONE  miner. He will just move to another pool (possibly automatically via a fail-over strategy) or setup his own pool. How does that solves the concentration problem? You can't split a single miner. You can contact him and ask to spread his hashpower. Forcing him away from ipominer solves nothing.

Ah, no.. we had more like 5-7x Coinotron's hashrate for VTC.

Well, that's assuming the hashrate would disappear from the network, or go to Coinotron -- either of those seems unlikely.

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 just sent an email notification to all the Vertcoin miners at ipoMiner that the VTC ports will be shut down within the next 48 hours.