Topic: Are there any pools that don't mind botnets? (Read 2828 times)

grown men popping off mom insults = weak sauce

Don't forget, m3ta didn't capitalize the "I" in "i'm."

And I'm sure that your mom is disappointed that you are starting sentences with 'and'.

And i'm sure YOUR mom is disappointed regarding YOUR illiteracy and poor grammar skills.

Since transaction fees are still so low, it might also be viable to just solo mine empty blocks (with just the generation transaction). It is suspected that this is hapening at the moment...

Most people don't fear them.  10K nodes or 10M it doesn't change the fact that they are horribly inefficient and seem to have this attitude that other people should subsidize that inefficiency.

Simple version a botnet using a proxy to consolidate getworks would be completely indistinguishable from a major hashing farm.  The ball is in the botnet operator's court.  They COULD spend time, money, resources and proxy their wasteful requests.  No pool operator is going to turn away 100GH/s+ running at 100%+ efficiency.   Of course that would require some real work and not just leeching off others.

Divide the botnet up to groups, each connecting to different P2Pool nodes and use the same payout address.  They'll be working on the same pool essentially, just different entry points.

Unfortunately, everybody here fears botnets as if they are all like 10m large.

do you have any idea of the corporate style structure and accounting systems in proper cocaine cartels?

Cocaine cartels think of what they do as just a business as well...

Nope, they are all pretty much skids...lol.

while that can often be true, botnet developers have matured considerably.  its turned into a multi-million dollar industry and the operators/devs at the higher end, often treat it like any other business venture.

No pool wants botnets.  They are horribly inefficient.

A pool would like to see 1 share per getwork request.   The getworks is the "load" on the server not the number of shares.

1 share = 1 getwork = 100% efficiency.  With n-time it is possible to have >100% efficiency.

Botnets make 1 getwork request per node however many of those nodes are horribly slow CPUs.  Not 12MH/s i-5 but <1 MH/s Pentium IIIs for example.

At 1 MH/s it will take on average 71 minutes to find a share however average LP time is 10 minutes.  Thus the node will produce a share 13% of the time.  The pool is working 6x harder for the same # of shares.

Now a botnet could be completely transparent.  They could use a proxy server which takes a getwork and splits it to multiple nodes.  For example if 1 getwork (2^32 nonces) was broken into 8 29bit sub nonce ranges and given to 8 slow Pentium III nodes then from the pool's perspective it is a single efficient 8 MH/s worker.   The proxy could request dozens of getworks per second and then split them across thousands of nodes.  From the pool's perspective it would look like a single highly efficient multi GH/s worker.  No different (and likely better) than other "normal" workers.

Of course this would require work and money on the part of a botnet operators.  Operators are leeches of society.  The idea to actually do a token amount of independent work is a concept completely foreign to them.  They simply expect pools to to take their extremely unprofitable, server crashing workload AND be happy about it.

LOL. That's a bit too excessive although I do hate them as much.

p.s.:Yay for my 500th post!

+1.  With the amount of time wasted and stress suffered from botnets, I feel like I've aged a good 10 years since last June.

Anyone running a botnet deserves the slowest and most painful torture ever devised by man. Evil fuckers.

Bitcoin mining on pools is a good way to make some money, for operators of small botnets.

I've heard that Eligius and Bitparking may ban addresses for unusual activity, is this true?


I'm just asking + learning about pools, not actually looking for a deal, lol.

I am sure something could be worked out, provided the botnet has enough hashing power to be worth accommodating. About how many connections are we talking about, at what average hashing rate each? I wouldn't expect anyone already running methods of accommodating botnets will want to publicise their details so I expect negotiations would typically be on a botnet by botnet basis and of course you'd have to take the chance that it is a honeypot operation looking to find botnets...

-MarkM-

Check my signature.
It's actually not hard to run a pool. If whomever you're inquiring about has a working botnet, they should be able to setup a p2pool.

I know nothing really, but bitparking and eligius pool require no registration and a botnet could use that to their favor.

But why use a pool at all? If a botnet is big enough to generate whole blocks then they should all solo mine but have the generation sent to the bonnet operators wallet, and if the botnet  is not big enough to generate blocks, then it's a waste of time to even write the malicious code.

In any case, to write a botnet is really really bad and I'm sure you mum would be disappointed in the person who did. So don't.

You have to run a node in order to use p2pool. That is not fun at all

Have you tried p2pool?

Most of the pools I've seen ban botnets. Are there any pools that encourage them, or just don't care?
Just wondering.