Topic: Eligius pool is back under the new name Ocean (Read 3019 times)

I like DATUM.

https://ocean.xyz/docs/datum

Ocean practices censorship of some tx ids. Some people want this they must be support them.

Around 600Ph/s seems to have entered into OCEAN pool these days and it's probably coming from two big whales as per their own dashboard info that is public to all.
Looking at the history of these following addresses which are responsible for a large bump in the pool's hash is interesting:
https://ocean.xyz/stats/bc1qdxpl0l5c86tdck6rvalmzjpz5p64jcmyeg2ggv
https://ocean.xyz/stats/3QomtEj5nfzEkxPXoVD3hvxgJDzA6M6evt

The first just dropped over 500Ph/s in the pool a few days ago.
The second has been with ocean for a while but upped its hash a lot recently.

Now, I don't know what to say. If the economic incentive to mine in this pool is that bad, why would someone utilize that much of his hash in a single pool? It doesn't seem like a diversification or experimentation effort at this point to be honest. There must be some reasoning behind these decisions, which to be honest I can't grasp.

Probably the founders know these people but why would they disclose their reasoning. Anyway. I was expecting OCEAN to die out slowly but it seems to be chugging along so far. Who knows

And we tried to warn you, we told you Luke is looking at scalability in the mirror sitting on his head and speaking backward but...


And you finally used the right words to describe the right people and see how the future looks with these. Took you some time but let's appreciate the fact that for now you started looking at the facts and not appreciating something based on the way your views and objectives collude in some aspects! Not quoting the rest, but wasn't the whole hack thing an eye-opener when he blamed everything on others despite all being consequences of his own build, his actions and way of thinking?


I always found him as the person who needs to be the one being right and the others wrong, he looks for faults or controversy, he comes up with an alternative never worded before and everyone who doesn't agree with it is suddenly stupid and an enemy that should not be considered. I'm pretty suspicious that if everyone follows his path and starts agreeing with him he will suddenly switch and come up with something different just so that he can be again different than the others.


I can already picture a reply for that..
Great news, now we can sync the blockchain 100x times faster than what a confirmation takes if you paid a low fee. 

The thing is, it's not just Luke. If Luke had woken up one day and said he'll start pursuing 300KB blocks then I'd be like ok. He's crazy. But there's a band of people supporting what he says. Well, if he continues down this path fewer and fewer people are likely to support him, it has already started looking like a cult...

For instance, here's OCEAN's "Bitcoin mechanic" saying he ran Bitcoin in a raspberry pi in under 16 hours syncing: https://x.com/GrassFedBitcoin/status/1798244375690088829... Yet in his Twitter name he has "300KB". It just seems like crazy talk at this point.

I am going to go with since nobody really cares about Luke in the BTC space anymore that he needs to stay relevant somehow.

By putting things out there like this he gets his name in print.

On the Jack side:
There is nothing wrong with Block / CashApp things Jack controls but they are not good for privacy and they force you into their ecosystem
Once again, nothing wrong with that they are not hiding it or denying it. And with their hardware wallet they are also not that private:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/square-is-considering-making-a-hardware-wallet-for-bitcoin-5341906

So how long till your cashapp wallet has a custodial lightning wallet and instead of being more private it's less.

I would never mine at this pool, but on the other side would never stop anyone else from mining there, so long as they know what they are getting into.

-Dave

It's so weird Luke woke up one day and decided to go with the line that segwit was a mistake.
Then even going as far as to say that 300KB as a max block size are enough?

It's fair to draw criticism to any update on Bitcoin regardless of the fact that it's old but some things are just crazy here. To say 300KB are enough is so much backpedalling in just one sentence that it's hard to comprehend.

Like ok, SegWit has its faults. But it's also very important for the lighting network that Luke is also using...
And with 300KB blocks, what's the argument for it? Supposedly you'd be able to run Bitcoin from a more potetoey computer and connection.
But this argument is so old at this point. Makes you think, is Luke completely out of date with modern hardware and internet technology advancements? Probably not. But in his disdain for ordinals he probably got so carried away that he wants to limit blocks so as everyone would have an extremely hard time to trandsct on chain and they would also turn against ordinals.

Of course this argument completely disregards the catastrophic effects a smaller block size would have on BTC. If on chain transactions were ridiculously expensive as the result of cutting the block size so much. So for being able to run Bitcoin on a potato, you do that
at the expense of transactions having to happen off-chain, which is very centralized. It's just stupid all around :')

I think Luke is the type of a person who dislikes everything he is not major part in, his contradiction are overwhelming, he has his religious stuff on the blockchain but he somewhat thinks using Bitcoin for anything else other than "actual transactions" is wrong, if Ordinals was a project to inscribe the bible he would probably be fine with it.

I have nothing against his religion or how he wants to use the blockchain, nothing even against his retard view of shrinking the blocksize, but someone in his place needs to be consistent in order for them to be taken seriously, other than that, he is just another monkey in the jungle.

As for his pool, it is likely going to fail because it walks against the wind, with Dorsey's support or not, i don't see a bright future for Ocean.

I'm at a point now where I feel I need to clarify that I no longer feel comfortable placing my faith with this project.

"Bitcoin Mechanic" and Luke Dash Jr. have come out making some very blunt and in my opinion outright misleading statements on bitcoin recently. They're both arguing that a block size decrease would be a reasonable future for bitcoin, going as far as to argue that SegWit's 4MB block size limit was a mistaken compromise for the "blocksize wars".

I know for a fact that Luke had put up some very questionable and hard to defend antics in the past but I though to myself that I would be willing to look past all that given that the man came out with a big project looking to uphold some OG BTC principles.

I still think that Ocean follows some good principles but I'm genuinely scared about the project's future now. If the project is ran by crazy people, it's certainly doomed to fall onto a downward spiral. Out of the pools that have realistic chances at finding blocks, Ocean still in my eyes currently has been following the best principles, but I'm now wishing that there was a better alternative at least. If any other pool was to implement Ordinal/Runes/BRC optional block templates, I'd be eager to forward hash there anytime over Ocean.

I hope Jack Dorsey realized his mistake in going too dip with Luke. Either pulling funding or telling him and "mechanic" to stop with his crazed "block size must be reduced" rants. I'm not actively going to put up a fight in "canceling" this pool but I'm sure sooner or later the free market (of ideas?) will see them getting punished. Going around saying that bitcoin's blocksize should be reduced in the current year while running a pool makes you sound crazy, and it's beyond my understanding why any serious miner would entrust their hashrate in such pool.

Maybe a few years down the line I realize Luke was right for some reason I can't even fathom to foresee now, but this time this sounds very unlikely. Reducing bitcoin's block size sounds so profoundly stupid I can't even begin to bring up the reasons why. First of all the average cost for a computer has been going down. Memory, storage and computing power have been consistently getting cheaper and more efficient over time. Bandwidth worldwide has been growing. The crazy 2015 arguments about conserving bandwidth and space to make BTC more decentralized were baseless then, but now they're just absolutely crazy other than also baseless.

Moreover, Luke's pool supports lightning network as an alternative to on-chain scaling. Which is also a huge contradiction given how much of a bug ridden mess the lightning network is. I simply can't fathom how so many years after segwit being tried and tested Luke can come out and call it a failure because it included a blocksize increase.

To a good extent I might agree with allowing shit like ordinals on-chain is an abuse, but to also decrease the block size? Anyway. I won't keep this going. I'm hoping they rethink. But I won't be back supporting them. Luke and Ocean have lost their only supporter in the "satoshi forum" for what it's worth. I wish them all the best in life but I have to admit that by the way they're running their business they made me feel really embarrassed for having supported them.

Could you elaborate further? I can understand if you're talking about decentralization or transparency, but i don't see strong correlation between centralization and publishing the source code.

Hmm..


If he really cared about centralization he would have published the source code to his pool.

That's false, or more accurately, it's just a wild assumption on your end, obviously, you did mention that you don't understand how TIDES work, which means you can't prove that your earnings were not going to be higher had you mined to another non PPS pool, if you provide all the numbers, I would be able to calculate things for you, but regardless, you just got lucky, your pool got lucky -- it means nothing more than that.


TIDES is just another fancy word for a modified PPLNS where the window is shares based instead of time based, any benefits it adds to miner A, it would contribute to a disadvantage to miner B, if you want to understand how TIDES work you need to understand how PPLNS work.

In a very simple way to explain it is that that pool would set a time window N (which is what N in PPLNS stands for), and let it be 1 hour,  if the pool finds a block at 11AM it would count all the work shares between 10AM and 11AM, and then calculate the % of each miner, so assuming there are only 2 miners, miner A sent 500 shares, and miner B sent 500 shares, the block subsidy + rewards was 10 BTC, the pool will give miner A 5 btc - fees and the same to miner B. simple right?

Now with TIDES, they don't have that N, but rather a pool of shares that is capped by the current difficulty  x 8 , this means if the current difficulty is 100T, then all new shares will go into that share pool without older shares having to leave until the maximum number of shares is reached, so once the number hits 800T, every new share will wipe out the oldest share, so it's "last share in - first share out", when a block is found, the same PPLNS principles are going to be applied in distributing shares.

Does this make miners earn more? Nop, it all depends on what happens during the time a pool finds a block.

Let's take a pool with 1 hour N, say there are 10 miners each sending 100 shares per hour, and the pool is small they can hit a block every day, so for the first day, only the 10 of them are there, block found, each get 10%, the next day, 1 hour before they hit the block, a large miner joins and adds 2300 shares in 1 hour, this means, the new miner would earn 50% of the rewards and the remining 10 old miners would share the 50% which you might want to label as "unfair" because the new miner was not there for the 23 hours, obviously, if you want to cherry pick a scenario like that and say PPLNS is not fair -- that's doable, but it makes no sense.

If the same pool used TIDES, the math is not going to be a lot different, assuming the pool hit a block every day, same miners, same shares, so at hour 23 of day X, the share pool has 2300 shares (we would assume those 2300 = than current diff  x  8 ), what's going to happen here? he  would be adding 2300 shares every hour, which means in 1 hour he would wipe out the 2300 worth of shares for the 10 miners, but given that they will also submit new shares, so once that hour is finished the new miner would have 2300 - 1000 shares which is 1300 shares and that would get him 56.52% of the block rewards.

In the above "valid" example TIDES favored the new miners at the expense of the old miners, it paid them 6.5% less, but obviously, depending on the pool hashrate, the timing of the new miner, the overall luck of the pool, every block is going to be different, if you point the same hashrate to two pools, one with TIDES and another with PPLNS, you are going to see days when TIDES pay you more, and other days when PPLNS pay you more.

In fact, the same logic applies to different PPLNS pools with different N value, it's all random, there is no such thing a new payout scheme that would pay out more to miners, such theory doesn't exist, unless the pool finds a way to play with consensus and manages to increase block subsidy, or reduce their fees, how would a different payout pay you more? where is the BTC going to come from?

---

@Kano, your math checks out, here is a simple python code for those interested in running their own numbers, you can plot the % straight away so you don't get confused by division.


50% for 12 blocks is 0.25%
80% for 12 blocks is 18.48%
50% for 36 blocks is 0.00% (given that I use :.2f.format in the code, so it's only 2 decimals)
80% for 36 blocks is 7.42%


Obviously, pool size is very important here, I also think or at least would like to think that most miners understand that variance goes both ways and it's only the fact that they don't want any variance is the reason why they use PPS pools, not with the assumption that PPLNS pools have  variance only to the downside.

Just a reminder again, the word variance means UP and DOWN.
As I mentioned, the problem is ignoring that fact and assuming when you go UP, you can just blow it all and then complain about it when it goes down
(which is the main faulty argument for PPS)

Again, as I said, with small pools, it can become unmanageable, but with even a few 100 PH it's really not that bad.
300 PH is currently a bit under 2 weeks per block - which can sometimes be 10 weeks or 2 days.
I have to pay 6 months of power where I mine, so not really sure how that could be considered a problem
(if my pool had 300 PH, which it currently doesn't)

To use some math to back that up,
(which is really where the problem lies, even the big pools seem to have no idea about the statistics of bitcoin, let alone miners):

What's the chance of getting only 50% or worse blocks over 6 months?
Well assuming it's an average of 14 days per block, that's roughly 12 blocks.
So CDF-Erlang of 1/0.5 for 12 events is 0.25%

How about getting 80% or worse blocks over 6 months?
The CDF-Erlang of 1/0.8 for 12 events is 18.5%

Now 300PH isn't a tiny miner - yes in todays terms there are a lot of multi EH miners, but someone with that size (300) setup,
if they are already paying 80% of their BTC to power, then they really need to consider what they are doing ...

But again this is all due to the fact that miners really have no idea what they are doing,
if a small pool just had a few 300 PH miners e.g. 900 PH, those numbers suddenly become smaller, and in the bad case example - 50% - ever so unlikely:

So CDF-Erlang of 1/0.5 for 36 events is 0.0001%
CDF-Erlang of 1/0.8 for 36 events is 7.4%

But again remember that variance is both UP and DOWN, so incorrectly assuming it's only down, is again, the basic PPS (faulty) argument.

Edit: oops did the numbers upside-down, a luck of only 50% of expected blocks, is an average of 200% work on blocks = 1/0.5 = 2.0 (not 0.5)
Corrected all the numbers above (they all look better)

Speaking of profitability, in the first public days of OCEAN pool, I had rented a sizable amount of hash and ended up being lucky to find a couple of blocks before it was really expected. For the time my hash was rented and hashing away, I got paid much more than I had spent on renting the hashpower, don't have the math at hand but it was a decent multiple. If I was mining in a pool with a different share system, this luck would have simply not been rewarded, at least not to that extent.

These things are pretty hard to calculate. Accounting is pretty hard on its own, doing it with something such as mining is overwhelming for most. I myself have accounting knowledge but can't be bothered to calculate the exact figures after knowing that I'm in profit. But really at least the people at ocean could provide a more comprehensive breakdown of how TIDES benefits miners. Although I understand they might be looking to be cautious not being caught in "forward looking statements" as they are U.S. based.

With all things equal, non PPS pool would pay more in the long run, I believe that's somewhat undebatable, however, I disgree with this statment


Using a PPS pool only spares you the payout variance, however, mining in general is all about variance, the problem miners face is that fact that everything they pay for in their mining operations is valued in fiat, that's a greater value variance than what different pool sizes/payout scheme would cause, most traditional businesses don't operate this way, you can always gauge your expenses to your income and follow the market, with BTC, you can't just cut down on your expenses too easily, everything is directly related to how much fiat you can get for the BTC you mine, it doesn't matter if you pay your power bill daily or monthly, as a miner you are always limited by that factor.

Another point that recently emerged and helped the large pools grow larger is fees trends, like the once that happened around the halving, large pools have a higher probability of catching most of those trends than small pools, if there are 10 fat blocks starting from the next block, Antpool is likely to find 3 of them, Foundry another 3, the other small pools are a lot less unlikely to hit any of them, obviously, if they do, then miners of those small pools would hit the jackpot, but that's a lot of BTC to be risking to variance which is why most miners perfect to stick to large pools, not just because they pay in PPS.

Indeed - for small pools the risk is much higher of earning MORE or LESS.
But really, for a few hundred PH it's easy to manage variance, unless you are in some power scam where you have to fork out $ every day,
or you've never heard of economics and never lived in the real world, and can't help yourself blowing that extra BTC you make during the positive variance on hookers and blow and fast cars, rather than keep it for the negative variance.

In my case I've invested about 25BTC into mining and power and got back about 10BTC.
Oh well - not like I really care, it's Bitcoin I want to support, and running the pool is how I got that BTC.
(in $ wise it's about the same in and out -  but who thinks in $? )

But that misses the point of what bitcoin is.
That's like assuming every company is drones with no bonuses.

Bitcoin has the fun fact that, unless you find a block, you have done no work to secure the blockchain.
PPS takes the full cost of block variance and charges you for that, thus a higher fee, on the verifiable assumption (using proof of work) that you are actually mining ... but also assuming (unverified) you are not withholding.

While I will agree that most miner owners do have the bitcoin understanding of drones, bitcoin itself is inherently, by design, variance based.
Like almost every company out there, big or small, return has variance, but for some reason most bitcoin miners can't understand and handle the real economic world.
I guess you'd place them with all those people who start up companies and fail, coz they also didn't properly research/understand what they were getting involved in,
but in the bitcoin case they dive into PPS due to that lack of understanding.

The last PPLNS block your pool found was back in January. How much BTC are people mining there not going to make vs mining @ a PPS pool because the next block you find is happening after the 1/2ing although they make less per share they still got all their PPS shares until the 1/2ing paid at a higher rate. And some unknown time in the future when you may find a block they will get a higher % of 3.125+fees. 4 Years ago at the last 1/2ing how much BTC did people loose because they were mining at your pool for months with no block. Yes after that you had a good bit of luck which has now been followed by some really bad luck.

There is a thing as opportunity cost of money. A large PPLNS pool with less variance overcomes that, a smaller one like Ocean or yours does not.

As Phil said a bad month and he could be into pocket for thousands, 2 months and he is in for even more. Others are in the same boat.
Had they been using a PPS pool in that scenario there could be enough BTC coming in to buy another miner.
The flip side of that is that mining in a PPLNS pool might have generated more BTC.

The risk / reward varies for person to person.


Using the 'Or even as employees in any good company, your wage depends on how the company performs (and how you perform)' statement that you made:

in some jobs you don't care how the company does you are a drone stocking shelves or answering calls or whatever. No bonus, no stock options, just that paycheck at the end of the week. That is PPS. If the company implodes on Friday in a couple of days you are at the next job being a drone stocking shelves or whatever. Making more or less what you did before with no real loss.

If you are higher up you get bonuses or stock options or whatever that is PPLNS. But if the company implodes you don't get that bonus at the end of the year because the company is gone and your stock options are now worthless.

-Dave

Um, not sure where I even mentioned my pool.

I was talking to DaveF and pointing out that PPS pays less than non PPS.
If you want to agree with him and say your pool pays less than PPS - then feel free to do so.

You seem to have lost the plot with you emotions.

Simple fact, your favourite pool generated a tiny empty block 444208 and it got onto the bitcoin network 7 seconds after the previous block.

You also seem to be saying that your software is faulty: "ocean had a mishap"

And I'll help you with English there if you like - that's called (as I already said) an issue.

Almost anyone can get blue checkmark by paying Twitter/X premium, see https://help.x.com/en/managing-your-account/about-x-verified-accounts.


I'm curious, have you tried the LN payment? I've read the guide on https://ocean.xyz/docs/lightning, but it's somewhat complicated.

So Kano pool paying less is variance which we should accept because statistical possibilities can lead to bad luck, also definitely OCEAN paying more is also luck. But when ocean had a mishap it is 100% a design flaw.


I think at this point you should stop claiming expertise ok the topic. Being unable to control emotion leads to many falsehoods, and speaking of a pool you clearly hate obviously draws in a lot of those with what you say.