Topic: Deepbit Approaching 50% Once Again - page 5. (Read 19135 times)

5%

Not a bad price to pay if you don't like variance. But yes, bigger pools have lower variability on proportional or score based schemes as well. So best way to solve the current problem would be taking away the control of the list of included transactions from the pools.

We're well into the phase of people setting up miners for friends and family and just letting it run or non detail interested people following instructions with deepbit as the pool example to set up. As long as either can stand the noise, heat, or extra electricity usage they will just let it run. Some might even be watching to make sure they're getting someone out of it. Either way, they're most likely not reading all the doomsday prophecies here.

Doesn't boggle me a bit.

It boggles the mind that the majority (or disturbingly close to) of miners are joining a pool with 3%/10% fees when free alternatives exist...

Sure, and you pay a 7% fee for that privilege.

FWIW, this ceases to be a concern with the PPS payout scheme. I get my earnings from continuumpool almost instantly.

It will always be easy for pool operators that make up >=50% hashing power to collude.
You will never know whether pool operators are colluding. Which ones can you trust? Best not to use any of them.
Yes, they are out to get you.  

I say again, the advantage of the biggest pool is the lowest payout variance.  Pools like Eligius have some great features like zero fees, etc. but they suffer because sometimes they get zero blocks in an entire day.  That never happens with deepbit.  Deepbit gets a few blocks an HOUR most of the time.

Pooled mining is a natural monopoly for this reason.  There needs to be some kind of technical fix, like the one previous linked in this thread. 

And even if deepbit is kept below 50%, it's still the case that the big pools as a group have the same natural advantage and will tend to control a big share of the network.  Two or three pools that control 50%+ (quite a bit over in fact) is not good because it is too easy for two to three pool operators to collude.  In fact there is no way in general to know that two "separate" pools aren't actually run by the same person.

Here's where you're a bit fuzzy on a few things:
- This was for residential/home computers.
- Apache was beating the pants off of IIS and it's stupid single-instance expenses.
- This literally has nothing to do with A) a machine someone isn't browsing from, B) any commercial machines.
- Firefox would've been adopted, anyway, the experience would've just sucked (oh, wait, that happened......)
- IE being "cool" wouldn't have swayed the adoption of Linux into Governmental and Scientific industries.
- Over 9,000 other parts of the big picture.

Back on topic -

OMG sky is falling double-spending I don't understand how this works my mining rig isn't profitable kilowatt per hour Captain Planet!

Come join continuum pool, new pool started by martok just last month, we have 10Ghash, pps, *new* web and old RPCinterface, and 0% overhead (whatever martok's expenses for running the server are are deducted from the winnings, and that's it.) I have been making much more btc ~50% with continuumpool than I did on deepbit, even though payout is sporadic.

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=8660.0
http://www.continuumpool.com

Deepbit does not have any great features that other pools dont, even so, the stats update is one of the worse out there. i mean, 1 hour balance update, wtf. Most of other pools are in real time, or nearly to.
Instant payouts is pointless for me... waiting for confirmed too, why i will ever want instant payout?? thats good for starters only, and after two weeks they lost interest in it too.

The only advantage of deepbit over other pools i see it is the payment methods, they are kind of unique, swepool now has the PPS too, but it is a new pool. Some people dont like the score method, and those are staying in Deepbit, the other mayor pools out there (Slush, BTCGuild and BTCMine) are using score methods, Slush, BTCGuild and BTCMine seen to be better pools for me, i like the stats of Slush and BTCMine, those are much better than Deepbit. BTCmine only lack a way to known how many money im doing per day like Slush.

Addicionally, the fees of Deepbit are excessive at this point.

You whant to known why Deepbit is the bigger pool? because it its the older one, Deepbit was on pair with Slush until 2 months ago, when the total hash rate of the network was ~1.5Thash and dificultty something in the ~90.000, then the Hash rate started to climb like crazy, that was because of the publicity, and the news about "Bitcoins" and "free money with vga cards" started to be posted on forums of all around the planet.

So far ive see about 20 guides on diferent forums around, all of those "Bitcoin starting guides" are writting about using Deepbit to mine, most of them are the same, copy&pasted on another forum...

Thats why Deepbit is the bigger pool.

Personally, i feel both Slush and BTCMine to be better, in all aspects. BTCMine has been having problems with LP lately, but i think is working ok now. Seriusly, i need a good pool with a good averange hash rate, no problems with disconnections (thats why i leaved slush), with good stats and security(i love th BTCMine bitcoin adress lock)... i dont need imposed fees and the useless instant payouts. Bitcoin.lc seems to be good but way too small to join at this point.

This is like "Internet Explorer", there are much better browsers, why it its the most used??? it may have something to do with Windows

Sorry for grammar errors, im from Arg.

Jesus, same bullshit with you guys every time. There is absolutely no support for your side so you just nitpick at little things to avoid confronting that fact. I specifically asked you to focus on one thing which you completely avoided twice. I failed to back up my claim? Because I specifically said I didn't want to focus on that. I don't see myself stating anywhere in that quote you provided of me saying that MS was forced to unbundle its software. Good job diverting.

I almost wish I had studied psychology because I'm so fascinated by how people can be so skilled at avoiding any reality in persistently believing whatever they want.

Tycho EARNED every percentage point deepbit gets with his hard work. If you don't like that he is approaching half the network, make your own pool to compete with his. The reason he has what he has is because of the feature his pool offers and his dedication to the stability of his pool. It is simply the best pool. Everyone hates people that do things they can't do.

My memory was perhaps a bit fuzzy at first, but I did take the time to read the article, at least:



Left unchecked, Microsoft would have used its power to elimnate all of its competition. Another quote from further down the aritcle:


The lawsuit was multifaceted. While the deep integration of IE was a major portion of it, that was not the entirety of it, as the article plainly stated in the 1st paragraph.

The guiminer has deepbit as #2 in the list. The #1 went down shortly after I setup my miners so I tried deepbit, saw it had a really helpful interface and have since had no reason to switch. I would guess this might play a roll in its popularity.

My comment about it being an unavoidable part of Bitcoin was the finding of increasingly rare (from the standpoint of any individual miner), but increasingly valuable blocks being a key part of Bitcoin's security.  Those make it valuable for individual miners to join pools to make the rewards of mining more stable.

But as you point out, switching pools is an easy and obvious thing for miners to do.  And it doesn't take THAT big of a pool to even out the rewards of mining.  I'm not sure being part of deepbit is better from that perspective than being part of any number of other, smaller pools.

And for this hours public service announcement....

This is completely wrong.  Your memory must be fuzzy.

Not only did it not have anything to do with Apple and Linux development, but it wasn't really a factor.  Deep integration of IE on Windows based systems has nothing to do with Redhat going out of business and the Linux kernel being forgotten.

There's a movie on Netflix you can watch for some actual interviews, opinions and facts.  I think it was called 'Revolution OS.'

That's a good point.  I was thinking in terms of centralized power, which I was thinking Bitcoin was designed to avoid.  But although deepbit has a lot of power, deepbit doesn't really control it, as you pointed out.  Anything bad going on, and it's very simple for everyone who mines in the deepbit pool to switch to another pool.  It's a democracy of sorts, really, with the amount of control a pool operator has being directly tied to how much trust miners have in them.  And given the relatively low cost to switching pools (as long as you cash out fairly often), a lack of trust can translate into a lack of power VERY quickly.  Which is in contrast to the central control of most currency.

Thanks for the insight, I really hadn't thought about it that way.

Well, the individual miner is just in for profit and has nothing to gain from the pool's ability to disrupt the functionality of the network, so we could safely assume that s/he has an incentive to take away this ability from the pool. So, assuming that we have a mining system that does this with few enough disadvantages, almost everyone with significant stakes will switch. If this is possible, I wouldn't call the current problem an unavoidable result of how Bitcoin works.

Here is one approach: https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=9137

Another could be creating a more distributed mining environment. For instance, we could embed an optional standardized pool functionality within mining software, that could be turned on at the user's will. Miners could constantly switch nodes that they get work. In this case though, a trust system or a sophisticated distributed accounting system would be needed.

His name was [Tycho]...(chants repeating)

For the kids who don't remember the browser wars, the first antitrust case against Microsoft was in 1998: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft . That case is the only reason that Apple is still a company, that Linux wasn't throttled early on, oh and it is also the reason your precious Firefox was able to be developed. MS was forced to open up their APIs by the resulting judgement from that case (amongst several other things). US V. Microsoft changed a lot of things in the computing world. But please, don't let facts stand in the way of your preconceived notions.

Right now there is a significant barrier to entry for any solo miner:the difficulty. Again, miners will migrate to the larger pools because those are the ones going to be paying more often, and soon the difficulty level will get so high that only the largest pools will solve multiple blocks per day.

Why attack the chain if you own most of the network? Simply sit back and rake in the fees from the miners. Far more profitable in the long term. Seriously, attacking the block chain is like killing the golden goose. A pool operator who works their way up to owning most of the network is probably not going to mess with the block chain, that could damage the exchange prices drastically (possibly permanently), and make all their time, effort and trouble worthless. Far better to let everything run as normal, with 2-3% of the network's mined coins each day going to that operator's wallet.dat