Topic: Eligius: 0% Fee BTC, 105% PPS NMC, No registration, CPPSRB - page 68. (Read 1061417 times)

Question .

For the past 2 blocks my status page has shown "Approximately 0.00000000 BTC remaining to enter payout queue. Maintaining your 3 hour hashrate average, this will take at least another a few seconds at current network difficulty of 47,589,591,153.63.".

Also, before the last block was found, my estimated change did not get applied to my unpaid balance, even though it should have been more even.

What's going on with the pay system!?

my 128,256 seconds hashrate does not show anything but zero since 30min. whats the problem?

Statistical part
I think I had about 80% shares rewarded on April 30. I still had 80% shares rewarded on May 31st. We can then grossly estimate the pool luck was 80% for May 2015.

Is it unexpected? Let's see...

Today, the reported hashing power is 6.7 PH/s. Assuming difficulty was at current rate for this month and hashrate has not moved for simplification, it means there should have been about 86 blocks founds. The estimation of the pool luck tells us that 80% of this expected value was found -> 67 blocks.

Is it statistically surprising? What are the odds that 67 blocks or less are found with what we know?

The number of blocks found can be modelled with a Poisson Distribution with mean 86. A quick Excel calculation tells me that with assumptions told in this post, there was about a 8% probability to find 67 blocks or less for the month of may. Not that surprising that it can happen.. That's the kind of variation you can expect with the size of the pool.

Let's remember that we are also more sensitive to the bad luck of the pool versus its good luck which can bias our view.

Conclusion
If you want less variation in your reward, you should seek bigger pool. https://blockchain.info/pools . You can also put your hashing power on many pools which will have for effect to decrease your variance.

For now, all my hashing power is on Eligius. I tried BTCGuild, Ghash, Antpool... But what is important for me is the transparency of the pool and the expected reward value (No fees). This is what you have with Eligius and I'm a big fan of the pool.

I find it unfortunate that it shrinks in hashing power since it increases variance, but the only thing I can do is keep my hashing power there...!

Agree, this is also getting me thinking. I only checked last weeks but this entire time ghash had nearly same hashrate the entire time but mined 3 times more blocks.

What's going on with this pool's "luck"??
This is ridiculous..
Can someone post the average luck for the last 30 days?

Wow, that was a lot of to-do about nothing... Look at any block explorer and tell me how many "empty" blocks you find. I've never seen one, though I know they can theoretically exist. Just because of this conversation, I think I'll pay more attention to it. but seriously?

Mostly the same information I said here, but FWIW: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/36qje1/why_can_a_block_have_only_1_transaction/crgtdxk

I don't know if I am capable of explaining this without explaining the Bitcoin protocol (and there are plenty of references you could read on it already). Blocks have two pointers, one to all past blocks/transactions, and one to new transactions. Both of these are just pointers, however. When people talk about block size, they are including all the new transactions, but that's just a matter of abstraction.

Someone (or a group of people working in concert) who can solve and submit an inordinate number of blocks (of any type) in succession can do bad things. This is a well-known problem for which there is no possible solution (at least no solution within the concept of having a decentralized proof of work blockchain).

Fortunately, in order to submit an inordinate number of blocks in succession with any significant probability, you have to have a lot of "mining power" (51% would definitely do it; maybe 33 1/3% under the right situations; probably somewhere in between the two under less "ideal" situations).


It's trivial to add one (or any number of) useless spam transactions to a block. If you're trying to save network bandwidth you could even calculate the spam transactions based on a formula, so you don't have to send the actual transaction content over the network. So rejecting empty blocks wouldn't add any security, and would really just add complications to the client. It could also potentially make Sybil attacks slightly easier (all you have to do to stop a miner from mining is stop them from getting new transactions, you don't have to shut down their network connection entirely).

You could have a rule where every block must have at least a certain number of bitcoin-days destroyed. But that would have its plusses and minuses. Something for an altcoin to consider (especially if you added something fun like negative transaction fees for "high priority" transactions), but not something that's necessary for bitcoin.

Where "artificially" means what, exactly? Everything we're doing is artificial.


Yep. A full block is better than an empty block. But the choice isn't between a full block and an empty block, it's between an empty block and a stale block.


Compared to nothing? The benefits are the ones I listed, including speeding up the confirmation of transactions.

Of that I have no doubt; however, blocks are found within seconds sometimes.  If I remember correctly, AntPool had a 3 second back-to-back block just a few days ago.  I also remember there was a very close (within seconds) back-to-back block by p2pool.  This doesn't include blocks found and submitted by miners on different pools that occur within seconds either.

I suspect (with a very high degree of certainty) that the bitcoin network has grown well beyond the point that we could ever expect a 10 minute period to elapse without a singular transaction occurring somewhere in the world.

I read the usage of the plural transactions to be a set from one to many.  I also think that empty blocks do indeed serve a purpose if there are no other transactions to be processed.  However, I am in complete agreement that if there are transactions to be processed, any created block should include any/all of those transactions and not ignore them outright just for the sake of adding a block to the chain, or keeping miners from stale shares, or whatever else has been given as a reason.

The kind of validation you're proposing would be rather daunting.  It would require every node have knowledge that when the block they're verifying was created there were in fact transactions that could have been included into that block.  You can't just blindly reject all blocks with only a single coinbase transaction, because it could very well be that there really were no transactions to include (albeit extremely unlikely).

Every single definition of mining states "transactions", plural.  Nothing is confirmed in an empty block, it does not meet the definition.  Seems to me the empty block thing is a huge oversight, and that empty blocks should not be valid and the network should reject them.  The only block that should have been considered valid with a single transaction generating coins was the genesis block.

Has there been any analysis of an "empty block attack"?  Imagine what would happen if an inordinate number of empty blocks were solved and submitted in succession?  Bitcoin would effectively cease functioning.

Until the block rewards subsidy goes away, an empty block still technically has one transaction: the coinbase which distributes the generated coins from the block reward.

So, while it isn't adding any value by including other transactions, it does, indeed technically fit the definition of mining.

I'll source the Bitcoin Wiki for the definition of mining, https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining.  The very first sentance of the page states:


Here's a few other mining definitions (emphasis added by me):

https://bitcoin.org/en/faq#what-is-bitcoin-mining

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bitcoin-mining.asp

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/Bitcoin-mining

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#Mining


Therefore, I contend that if you're not adding transactions to the blockchain (i.e. solving an empty block) then you are not mining.

I agree that the transaction is perfectly valid.  However, valid or not, until that transaction is recorded and confirmed in the public ledger, the transfer of coin is not legitimized.  An empty block certainly helps to ensure that malicious activity becomes that much harder to perpetrate on the previous blocks, but it does nothing for all of those transactions out there waiting to be added to the chain.  Now, if there simply are no transactions to be included, then by all means, add empty blocks.

Not sure I follow here... I've added an empty block to the chain (well, there's at least 1 transaction because of the generated coins).  That block has no other transaction.  It does, however, know its parent.  Are you stating that because I know my lineage until genesis, that's equivalent to having all transactions in every block?  I'd argue that if this were the case, then every block would be larger than it's predecessor.  Genesis would be size (n), block 1 would be (n + m), block 2 would be (n + m + x) and so on... obviously that's not true.  I'll agree that every block has knowledge of its own transactions and a way to get to all previous transactions, but not that every block has every transaction .

No, that transaction remains perfectly valid as long as the sender is honest. The blockchain is only needed to provide security against dishonest senders.

Which is the same as any new transactions in the block.

I can write a transaction down on a piece of paper and leave it on my desk, too.  It means absolutely squat until such time that some miner somewhere provides a block that is added to the public ledger known as the blockchain.  Mining's primary purpose is to confirm the validity of transactions by adding them to the ledger through proof of work hashing.  If my transaction never makes it into that ledger, it may as well never have happened.  Expand upon that and see what happens.  A whole bunch of blocks created doing nothing but generating block rewards that can never be used because no transactions are ever included in the blocks.  Extreme case?  Absolutely.

No, empty blocks do not include every transaction mined by the prior blocks, they include a way to get to a parent block.  That block might have the transaction, or it might not... but it also includes a way to get to its parent block and so on back to the genesis block.

No, any node can arbitrarily record any transactions it wants without miners.
Mining's primary purpose is to provide security for them.

"Empty" blocks are not really empty either: they still include every transaction mined by the prior blocks.
And since 1 block is not sufficient to confirm a transaction, it's really the block 5 down the chain which is beneficial to the transactions in the block mined anyway.

There is no need to try and "speed up" transactions artificially.  Everything positive you said about an empty block applies to a block full of transaction, only the full block provided worth to the network because it contains transactions, which is a block's purpose.  You even admit in your post that a full block is better than an empty block.  And I still do not see any benefit from an empty block, but again I appreciate the attempt at explaining to me.