Topic: Eligius: 0% Fee BTC, 105% PPS NMC, No registration, CPPSRB - page 156. (Read 1061417 times)

Possibly the 'lesser known' bandit. Quoting his first post for posterity:


and here is his site from back then:


I guess he must be known in the Chinese community

So now, are we not going to ask the question... who are these bandits? They have developed their own ASICs, customized CGMiner and have a massive mining operation.

Are we not worried that they have released their malfunctioning crap to the public? How could they resist selling chips and generating extra revenue?

I think we can safely assume these are chinese-made. Could it be Avalon, BitMine A1, ASICMiner or some lesser known company?

And

Seems like mining hardware manufacturers would benefit.  They could test their hardware and get paid for it without increasing the difficulty and driving down the price of the hardware.

Looks like Con thought of this already

5 of the 7 blocks you mentioned were discovered after the potential scam or custom mining software mistake was discovered and the miner notified (May 3rd). It might have been that he fixed or change the mining software or that he stop the scam once he was discovered. The problem is with all the time he spent mining before that time without submitting any shares that were found.

BTC TO

come on guys...really ppl trying to defend or argue with this...he admitted that he "KNEW" there was a problem...pretty much case closed after that, he thought it was fixed but it really wasn't...either he really thought it was or was just playing it off as it was...either way ppl got screwed cause of him...we don't need his ok to try and make what little mends we can

If someone pisses in my water bucket because he thought it was his piss bucket, then I guarantee you that I'm going to take some of his water, contract or no, whether he wants me to or not. I'm not going to allow my well-being (or my family's well-being) to be contingent on his moral fibre.

The result will end up being a bump in percent shares rewarded for those who mined during that time period.

This is not exactly what has happened here. *Contracts* were not broken.

What is happening here, it seems to me, is that an error was made, and the person making the error did not fully disclose it or try to remedy the error in a honest and forthright manner, rather chose to call foul and claim the withheld BTC - relying on the trust-less, mathematical nature of the system.

The error was discovered and the pool op decided to withhold payment - taking the position that the work was not done to the required standard.

Is Eligius  going to retroactively apply a contract based on some arbitrary statistical measure of block finding luck on all its miners? What exactly is that measure? Where is this standard going to be documented?

Bitcoin and its protocol is not meant to require "judges" and the decisions of "trusted" people.

One in a position to be able to make such a change (such as the case here with wizkid et al) should consider the impacts of doing so  carefully - it is a large responsibility.

Similarly, I also think that brucexie should also consider the impact of his obvious attempts at non-disclosure and the apparent withholding of his knowledge regarding the scale of the errors. It is easy to assume that he must have known about negative impact this would have had on others.

A good outcome would be for Brucexie to apologize and *allow* the money to be distributed; then Eligius sets about creating a statistical measure of work quality going forward that everyone has the opportunity to accept or reject.

+1 well said...+1billion to WK and i know it ain't gona be easy, but if *most* of us waited patiently for nmc payouts, we can wait for this...so pretty much anyone who mined on here while the attack was happening will get a kickback? i'm sure it won't be much but it'll be nice

Brucexie,

Here is the deciding factor as far as I am concerned.


When it was discovered that this problem existed with your software/hardware on BTCGuild did you return the BTC that you had been paid, but did not properly earn?


If not, then you are guilty because you have taken BTC that you have admitted to not earning. This is called stealing.

....and quacks like a duck..... :-)

Exactly.

If I contract someone to do some work for me, and not only do they not do it but they cost me money, there is no way I'm going to pay them. In fact I'd probably penalise them and try to recover costs, especially if others are affected.

Thank you Wizkid for telling and showing us all the evidence you have collected and what the end result will be. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmO7a_g_lbk

Who me? I did not just create this account. I created it a few months back when I got interested in more than just dogecoin.

I happen to paying more attention on bitcointalk just now because, a) it is raining here and b) bitcoin has or is about to reach a tipping point that affects everyone using it.

There is a very distorted process to fact finding here - and your post exemplifies this well.

My understanding is that the only reason the issue was corrected was because it was brought to his attention after it had been going on for months.  With as large of an operation as it seems like he runs, if it was not intentional then he would have noticed it much sooner on his own.  This is not a court of law, and If it walks like a duck.....

Greetings Eligius miners,

Wow...

First, thank you, everyone, for your support.  It is, as always, greatly appreciated.  It is good to know that the community supports our response to the withholding attack.

Next, I'll just clarify some of the points brought up by the attacker and others.  Also, I'll venture to guess that “Brucexie” is at least in some way tied to the addresses in question, since the signed messages from our support ticket system were valid and they have knowledge of info in that ticket.

For reference, here are the messages they signed:


Before I continue, I think I need to once again make one thing clear: under no circumstances will we knowingly pay even a single satoshi to a discovered block withholder.

That said, let me give some more detail on all of this.

The attacker seems to only want to focus on mining post-May 3... after they supposedly stopped attacking.  However, according to the stats database, they have used Eligius with the first address since mid-March.  The second address was auto-tied in with the first based on IP and other metadata (see below for details).

Here are graphs of the attacker's hashrate on both addresses, 17JkL94B2ngJg4QQZuiozDQjnxXB6B7yTc  and 1Gu8zxRi8cyENV8CQe52D7QEsiZ7ruT73u respectively:



While I didn't really want to go into statistics here, because they are only part of the picture, some people have requested them, and I previously stated I would disclose more data, so here it is:

The attacker submitted two blocks prior to commencing their withholding attack, at the beginning of their use of Eligius, on 2014-03-21 and 2014-03-22 (blocks 291,748 and 291,782 respectively).  This appeared to be before they had their full hash power online, also.

Prior to 2014-05-03 (when I added them to the payout queue filter) the 17JkL94 address was paid a total of 429.19371155 BTC by Eligius.  They also had 65.04471047 BTC in shelved shares at that time, for a total of 494.23842202 BTC worth of shares submitted.  This works out to a CDF of about 99.999998081747%, or around 18x difficulty worth of shares for their personal round… which has never happened on Eligius, or any other pool as far as I can tell, an impossibility.  Theoretically, anything at all (your witness of someone committing murder, the cop's speed radar, etc etc) could just be "unlucky". But there comes a point where rational people (including courts and juries) start saying "certain". In this case, that line is far crossed here.

Afterwards, they started mining on the second address, which I also added to the filter due to the obvious relation.  (While obvious, this relationship between the addresses was also confirmed by the attacker later, and here.)

After they supposedly stopped their withholding attack, starting around 2014-05-07 (after over 55 days of withholding) they started finding blocks (still at a below average pace for their hash rate) and mined five additional blocks for Eligius.

In total there were 654.71340416 BTC worth of shares awarded to the attacker’s addresses under CPPSRB.  The attacker also accumulated 67.77237472 BTC worth of shelved shares, for a total of 722.48577888 BTC worth of shares submitted to Eligius.

The 225.51969261 BTC is from awarded shares held from payout (shares credited to the attacker under CPPSRB).  Since the attacker was withholding blocks, the attacker did not legitimately mine any shares and is not due any reward.  The best we can do is not allow them to gain any further benefit from their attack and pass this portion of the loss on to them.

As far as I’m concerned, the attacker owes Eligius miners all of the BTC they obtained falsely during their withholding attack, a total of 429.19371155 BTC (not including the ~200 BTC they are demanding).

Along with the statistics against the miner, the miner actually admitted to another pool that they were executing a withholding attack.  While they claimed this was unintentional, it doesn’t actually make a difference since miners lost revenue from their attack.  Recent posts by the attacker once again change that story.  Either way, the attacker has admitted they were withholding blocks.  Properly distributing the coins erroneously awarded as a result is just a consequence of their attack.

Heck, the poster admitted the issue on this very forum, today:

Long story short, through some detective work, some cooperation, and a decent amount of effort this attack has been confirmed beyond any doubt.

That said, I will be working towards my goal of properly awarding affected miners using the held work credit.  This is not a trivial process and will take a bit of time since there is a lot of security in place to prevent this in the first place.  These security setups will basically have to be taught why this change is legitimate so that it can happen.  I will document everything thoroughly to ensure there is no question later as to the disposition of the funds and the changes made to distribute them.  I will also be taking additional security precautions to ensure that I do not leave any avenue open that makes Eligius-side data less secure as a result of this.

At this point I’m considering this issue resolved and closed.

-wk