Topic: Eligius: 0% Fee BTC, 105% PPS NMC, No registration, CPPSRB - page 52. (Read 1061862 times)

Which standalone miners are we talking about?

Spondoolies lacks motive - afaik they aren't self-mining. Also their minergate has been open source from the start.

Bitmain recently released complete source code for at least the S5 controller.
Their previously-closed kernel module is aware of blocks, but only writes to a log when it sees them - nothing seemed suspicious there.
It's conceivably possible that it used to do something different before the code was published, but...
Their self-mining operation is so large, they would need to have their admins install non-public firmware images, and someone I know who has such a position was never told not to use the public firmware.

BFL's Monarchs are controlled by a PC, and the miner itself has no way to really do this.

Avalon 2 and newer do most of the heavy lifting in FPGA, but that is open source and I didn't notice anything odd looking at it a while ago.

interesting allegation...it would be absolutely scandalous if true, to the point of no one in their sane mind would buy anything from that company again.
Can any sophisticated coder explore the binaries to check for such potentially withholding code?

As much as I wish there was something that could be done about bad luck, there really is nothing to be done.  If the pool op could control if the pool was lucky or not... well, that'd be great... but would probably defeat the purpose of mining if it were possible.

I've been checking and double checking everything pool side as I've been making improvements to the back end.  The pool is almost entirely on new servers now vs a month ago.  Slightly fatter bandwidth pipes and all to better handle the huge bursts of outbound bandwidth that accompanies updating work on over 100,000 workers connected to the pool.

I investigate every stale block the pool finds.  I've not seen anything out of the ordinary. Just losing some races with the Chinese pools a couple of times where they confirmed their own blocks.  Unfortunately, normal.

I have a suspicion that some mining hardware out there may be software time bombed and have miners who are using the hardware unknowingly withholding blocks sometimes.  Unfortunately there is next to zero chance of verifying this in our lifetimes.  Given that luck has been crap across basically every pool with accessible stats I think it's a pretty plausible conspiracy theory. It also makes some logical sense given that some of the largest miners today are sellers of ASIC mining hardware.  Basically would effectively cut into their customers' profits (withholding some of their blocks) and increase their own (by keeping the network difficulty increase lower than the amount of hardware sold, plus they could obviously disable any time-bomb code when using the hardware for themselves).

An individual entity performing a withholding attack probably wouldn't cause such widespread poor luck, and I don't see any conclusive evidence of any individual withholders on Eligius using the algorithm's I wrote for investigating potential withholding (which use much more data that just the username).

Anyway.  I caught up BTC payouts the other day.  Caught up NMC payouts today.  And things should be business as usual around here.  Would be great to find more hash power, but with the super low margins on mining these days I'm not all that hopeful, unfortunately.

And with changing into winter time here in Europe, we've got one more hour for whining...

Fun fact, I did the calculation again and now it's 0.7%

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=CDF%28ErlangDistribution%282000%2C+2000%29%2C+1.0559

That's right, in only 10 days the luck has been so bad that it straight up halved the percentile built up over a whole year of mining.

I know posting this won't make any difference, but I feel like we've earned some whining rights by now.

Well, how about that. It should have been 1/1000 weeks chance or 1/20 years roughly according to ogranofcorti if i understand him correctly.
If I was running a pool, I would double check everything and updated to whatever is working for others, if necessary.

Thank you for the quick update Luke! I know that luck isn't the same as stale blocks, but we did have 3 stale blocks this week, which feels higher than average at least, so I thought it'd be good to compare to Slush's update today.

Also, I don't know what version slush upgraded from, but there have been no noteworthy changes between 0.10.1 and 0.11.1 that would affect stale blocks (nor is it possible to affect luck).

The main bitcoind is running a 0.10.1-based bitcoind. (I don't know how to get info on the other bitcoinds.)

Note that luck is not related to stale blocks (what slush erroneously calls orphaned/invalid).

So Slush's Pool posted a news update regarding recent orphaned blocks:

https://mining.bitcoin.cz/news/recent-orphaned-blocks-explanation/

I'd be very interested to hear from wizkid057 or Luke-Jr on whether we are also watching our pool; what version of bitcoind Eligius is based off, and whether block submission propagation times are being monitored at all. I'm not just asking because of our terrible luck as of late, which I understand is entirely by chance, but also because having more information on the internal operation of the pool and block submission/fast block relay statistics!

That's what I mean.... wondering if I should chant my old song again :-=

Well, F2Pool is nearing 50%, there's also that.

It really is creepy to see how the luck is also centralizing in mining since a couple of days.

All off the whales are gone?

good 

sorry to inform you that you will never see any of that money back, once eligius hits the network difficulty shares are placed in that virtual room full of shelves were shares get
in but never get out

i not have money for keep the mining, i have spent all in 1 order by nicehash for mining on eligius

Yep, I noticed that as well. Currently the pool hashrate is down to ~10 Ph/s from ~17 a month or two ago. Though my gut tells me that jumping in now, when luck is low, would provide a higher chance of getting 100%   But gut feelings with regards to probability theory often tend to be wrong

Meanwhile, the top miner is down to 85%...

no other pps pool shelves shares, they pay a set rate for share submitted and accepted and miners pay has nothing to do with luck

That's absurd, as long as the block is not found, there is no block reward and therefore no cash for anybody. :-)

We already had several periods of very good luck in the past, there is no reason we don't have others again later on.

Mining is like a lottery, you never know when you are going to make the average, but eventually you do. Funny enough, people tend to stop mining at a pool when luck is low, and to stay or join a pool when the luck is good. Since long term averages are at play here, the pool hoppers ought to behave exactly in the opposite way, provided other pools pay shelved shares as well, of course.