Topic: ==== Eligius, please pay my 200+ BTC ==== - page 3. (Read 12605 times)

There are some legitimate and worthwhile reasons for performing a block withholding attack.  Let's say that you have a substantial percentage of your net worth in bitcoins and a pool operator is approaching 50% of the net mining rate, threatening the value of your bitcoins.  Might it not make sense for you (and others in a similar situation) to mine at the offending pool operator's site with your miners configured to do a block withholding attack?  Until the pool's luck is adversely affected, you would still receive nearly the same payout you would otherwise receive, but at the same time you would be negatively impacting the luck of the offending pool which would lead other miner's to switch to a different pool once they noticed their earnings began to decline.

That's just it, though.  You're not crashing the pool, you're only affecting the pool's luck stats and impacting everyone's payouts including your own.  I don't understand why.  Let's say that you are successful in your attack, then what?  Are you hoping that miners get disgruntled and leave that pool?  OK, so now you have to hope that the miners that left all join your own pool?  Seems like a long shot, and a pretty lousy choice of methods to get miners onto your pool, especially since by its very definition you're losing revenue you would have made just mining properly.

Let's say that I have 1PH/s of mining equipment and that I have hacked my miner software to not submit block solutions.  I would have to launch my own pool, and then spend all of my mining efforts trying to disrupt the other pools, all while advertising and trying to draw miners into my pool.  I'm losing revenue the entire time because I'm withholding block solutions.  I'm playing the odds that by causing enough disruption in the other pools, a ton of miners will leave those pools and join mine, at which point I'd fix my software and hash away properly.  Are those odds really that good?  I wouldn't think so.  I would think the revenue lost during my "exploratory" mission would outweigh the gains I *might* make later on.

I guess that's where I misunderstood the use of a pool.  I didn't realize the miner knows when it solved a block.  I thought the pool distributed the work and determined if a block was solved.  The use of shares was just there as a measurement of how many times a miner submits solutions based on certain difficulties.  If a share was submitted that solved a block, the pool would then make the announcement.  Guess I've just been in lala land about this.

Crashing a pool so yours gets better hash rates maybe?

Simple explanation: miner was submitting real shares; however, shares that would have potentially solved the block were withheld, either due to an innocent coding error in the custom version of cgminer, or a malicious one.  In any case, the result is that by withholding block solutions, the miner gets rewarded for the shares they submit, but everyone gets penalized because block solutions are not also submitted.  Personally, I don't understand the motivation for such an attack since it affects everyone, including the miner.  What benefits does it offer other than to affect the pool's luck statistics?

So I get you wanting a solo fork for pooled mining.  I just can't see the benefit.  Is it so the small miners don't need to keep the block chain on their system?  I also understand your gambler's analogy.  The craps table is my weakness   I've set up eloipool on one of my computers to run and mine some to it for that long-shot payoff.  Can you elaborate more as to why solo pools vs. private pool/bitcoind?

Also, having now caught up on the 6 or 7 pages of reading, is the 'simpleton version' of this that the person was submitting shares that were not real and therefore everyone was getting proportionally lower payouts?  And if that's the case, isn't that a flaw in our pool software design? If he was withholding block solved notification, would that matter? Isn't there the risk someone else would solve the block while he waited?  For myself that does not seem to have an in depth understanding of all this, there appears to be a lot of finger pointing (and probably rightfully so), but another piece of the puzzle is missing for it to click in place.

How does creating a fork *on purpose* benefit the network?

boy you really want solo fork don't ya? isn't that like solo mining..but on a pool but your still solo mining..which is kinda pointless?

Yeah IP banning is an uphill battle. The problem is not the IPs, but identifying a unique signature that is this mining rig regardless of its IP addresses and BTC public keys, as an interim method of blocking them across the major pools, while finding a common fix that all pools can employ that doesn't involve forking anything.

Well I supposed pools could vet miners really carefully like coin base does.

But I don't think miners want to send in id proof of location yada yada yada.

 While the solo fork option stops the attack many miners want the steady .12btc a day that  3x 1th machines bring in on a pool.

 they don't want to go 6-7 months at a time to hit a block.

I am not liking that so far the only thing to stop a bad luck attack is a solo fork option.

I suppose I could get 5 friends with a total of  3th each   we could all solo mine on a fork provided by btcguild or bit minter  or eligus    it should take the 15th about 6 weeks to hit

a block, but with bad luck that 15th could go 18 weeks easy.

This is why if you offer the solo fork as a pool op you take the risk off the pool and put it on the miner.

I am too small of a miner to really worry. 2th  for btc and 25mh for ltc.   if the pools offer a fork I put 10% in the fork and still mine merged with 90%.  And I hope for the best.

This needs to be solved by some clever pool op or mining will suffer a lot.

Maybe a totally naive question, but... As far as I understand, the guy(s) behind the attack used a "homebrew" version of cgminer. So there are working versions and non-functional versions of cgminer.

Now it would be easy to test some versions and produce a hash of the working ones. It would be easy to produce a hash of the cgminer on the miners and send it out to the pools. If the hash is contained in a list of the hashes of working cgminer-versions, the miner is accepted, otherwise not.

As I said: Just a naive question for discussion...

* Apparently this can be difficult to do with Stratum.
* If you wait before broadcasting the winning block, another pool may publish first.
* If you publish the block and verify the suspected miner at the same time, the suspected miner may well see the published block and be able to falsely pass your test.


grnbrg.

That could work as long as the 'bad luck attacker' is big enough .  His work around would be   100x  2th accounts   and that may slow him down a lot to set up.

use your idea and my idea.  I think quite a few people would divert hash power to a solo fork if given the option.  your idea slows the attacker down since he needs to have enough small accounts to do it.   my idea make the choice on the miner.

 end the risk of a bad luck attack by solo mining our solo fork   or accept the risk and release us of  liability if we fail to stop a bad luck attack.


That is a pretty decent way of dealing with the problem.   One thing for sure doing nothing is really not a good choice by pool ops.  So I hope they do something worth while.

I offered this:
When a block is found, send the winning nonce to other large miners and see if one doesn't return it.

His gear represents a true threat to all pool mining.

 So far no one has offered a method to prevent bad luck attacks to their pool...
  A solo fork for a pool works but and a big but  not very attractive to the smaller miners.
Pretty sure the bigger pools see and understand the threat of a bad luck attack.    I can see this to be a real issue from now on.

To any pool op out there   besides a solo fork what other solutions are there for us?


At New liberty   thanks for seeing and mentioning my ideas value.

for me I make money mining and selling and setting small guys up to run a small mining op.  Bad luck attacks would kill off many new people coming into the game.

Most people on this site and other talk about btc going to 2k 3k 4k to the moon.

Growth is the only way to make that happen.  I have said selling a small miner like a R-box on ebay would be very nice to attract newcomers if you point them to a pool with a solo fork.       Cost is low and every block you have a small chance to win.

People do not understand a gambler's mind on this website .... Gamblers want action..   Many play 3 digit numbers legally and illegally   and get paid off at 500 to 1 odds when the real odds are 1000 to one.

Playing an r-box at solo mining is not easy to win  more then  a 600 to 1 chance at current diff to grab 1 block in a month.    but the payoff is very high.

15000 bucks..   many gamblers would buy into that.   I have been pushing at the pool ops to start solo forks for a few weeks...

  So far all I get is a big FORK YOU   pun intended.  I would go into a rant against brilliant computer techs/it guys/code writers which I am not

in that club  , but I won't   as maybe they will see the values of my idea instead of resisting it.

They cannot be banned.
They can change IP and BTC address.

He probably disappeared because he realized he ain't getting nothing.

Even the "big pools" are operated like start-ups.
They do not accommodate litigation risk into the profit/survival model.

Your suggestion is a very good one and ought be a consideration for those pools that want to still be in business in a year or two.
It is easy to implement and shifts the risk to the miner from the pool operator.

Another option for the individual would be to use a service like APICoin.io which will run your bitcoin node in the cloud and solo mine using that.
It is much less expensive than running a high availability server node on your own, and offers many other advantages.

That or his so called "mining partners" told him to shut the hell up before he got them banned from all the major pools.

He vanished right around the time everyone realized that not only were we owed the 200+ BTC that were held back, but also the 400+ BTC or more that he was paid for mining when he was not contributing.

Hey I can solo mine on my own and dedicate a server to run the bit coin -qt  to do it.      this is not about me this is about the major pools refusing to offer this option.     I point this out simply to help>

Two pools admitted they had this happen to them  BTCGuild And Eligius.

Look at this from the viewpoint of lawyers.  They may tell clients not enough to sue for only 200 or only 400 coins.  

 A clear case of neglect on the part of pools to guard against this happening is hard to prove. <<<<  This may have been true from 2009 up until now.

Now every pool not offering protection of some type against a " bad luck attack "  would be liable as being willfully neglectful of preventing that type of

attack.

  One method of defense to offer against a  ' bad luck attack ' is a solo fork on your pool.

So once again I ask all large pool ops to consider this.  

1) Remember the attacks  occurred = FACT

2) The guy that did the attacks by an accident or on purpose can do them again. = FACT

3) So far no large pool has told us what they will do to stop this attack.

4) The attacker can sell his tech to the 400 pound gorilla cex.io

5) solo forks on your pool prevent this attack at least on your solo fork they will stop the attack

6) this is a real threat to BTC   and/or all coins   as large pools can use the tech against small pools

 So I ask again since a solo fork option  stops the attack why do all big pools refuse to offer the fork???