Topic: F2Pool is directly threatening Bitcoin's future (Read 8201 times)

There's no stopping.

You can only mitigate by getting network hash to move off of those pools and onto other pools (decentralizing).

The problem is - any smaller pool is going to find it VERY hard to attract users due to the small quantity of blocks they find (and the irregular payouts that would happen).

This problem is going on, they don't accept any Tx for their blocks. Can't we do anything about this situation? How can we stop these Chinese monopolists? I think they have government support, otherwise these people can't organize that type of thing. We have to find a useful way to boycott them.

Yes, the payout is less consistent, makes it tougher for planning. But yes I will probably make more with Kano which is why I plan to mine there. I'm not sure where the "here" is you mention (F2Pool maybe?) but yes you are probably right.

You'll make more by mining on Kano than you will here, which makes ROI quicker and overall BTC earned higher on Kano across the miner's lifespan. I think you mean daily payouts are less consistent, but that doesn't matter to the overall picture.

I just picked up an S7, and have about another 1TH is random miners (I know, small fish) and I am definitely going to be sticking with smaller pools. Maybe not as consistent for hitting that magical ROI.

Why try and make a quick buck and threaten bitcoin's future when you could foster it and let it grow, much greater profit long term than short term.

I'd take 3 S7s any day...I'm stuck for the moment with 4 S3s and a dino S2...but it's still fun (I don't have to pay for electricity  )  Given my past results on slush, they'd generate over 1BTC/month.

After absorbing all the data that's out there for the last several months, and running Slush pool for a while (which was productive and no complaints), I'm sticking for the time being with ck's solo pools with Slush for my failover.

Macbook's comments leave me somewhat in a Homer Simpson "Doh?" state of mind, and they tend, in my view, to only support what's been said.

with everything I'm reading I'm confused even more, I wonder if I was wrong to buy 3 x S7 batch8, at least to retract my expenses.

pool only = I will never see a block.
other pools pps, you earn a pittance,
f2poll, and antpol I see that are in bad shape for too many empty blocks.

I will have to choose which pool?

Lulz - only you can do that

Please feel free to delete my posts since they don't fit your agenda.

Rage? Zero.

Your statement is simply a Bitcoin 101 statement that clearly too few people realise including f2pool

I'm quite familiar with it.  It's not my fault if you are so blinded by rage you are unable (or unwilling) to get what I meant.

And for the record I am actually SOLO mining right now, with almost no hope of finding a block.  So you could say that I am doing more to purely support the network than most people (unless you know a lot of other people burning 15kw for nothing)!

Any peer 2 peer network is vulnerable to 50% control.
Basic knowledge.

It's even mentioned in the original sotashi document ... go read it

And this is why a working consensus that is followed by  everyone (ideal)  is important or it crumbles.

If BTC is this vulnerable it is worthless.

I am already there, I do not mine on any pool that is over 10% of network hash rate. Remember this is supposed to be decentralized, if we all jump on the same pool that is centralized.

An SPV pool blaming another SPV pool for it's empty nlocks.......

You have improved and I for one do appreciate this.  If we can get antpool to follow suit  we could really cut this empties down a lot.

As everyone knows Bitfury may be ready to put 200ph on line over the next 10 days. I need go back to see but I believe they have quite a few empties as it stands now.

With F2pool  and hopefully Antpool reducing empties any Bitfury problems will be lessened.

We really will all need to pull together as the ½ ing is coming price of coins will need to be over 600usd for many miners to stay in the game. So a ton of infighting between all the pools miners and developers will not help price.

We have two empty blocks in the past few hours. Investigation has revealed that:

For block 388239, which was found at 23:23:45Z, was due to the previous block by AntPool failed to send out their block in time. Our nodes did not receive the complete block data of 388238 until 17 seconds later, or 23:24:02Z;

For block 388252, which was found at 00:33:02Z, was due to our extreme luck. We found this block only 1 second after the previous block by bitclubpool.

http://poolbench.antminer.link/ has more timing data. You can see there are only four records for AntPool’s block 388238 (poor block propagation). And the time difference between 388251 and 388252 is very small.

How full/non empty were they?

Since this announcement, there have been 6 empty blocks added to the chain.  None of which came from f2pool.

BW.com - 2 of their 11 blocks were empty
AntPool - 4 of their 21 blocks were empty

f2pool - 0 of their 14 blocks were empty

So, at least on the surface in the past 16 and a half hours or so, whatever f2pool did appears to have greatly reduced their empty blocks.  It still doesn't excuse the SPV mining... but at least in this short timeframe it appears to be a step in the right direction.

A constant reliable daily payout is a big thing if you are running a lot of hash.

The power bill is constant say 1040 usd a month if you are running  12 s-7's

To be able to know you are going to be paid every day makes it easy to pay your maintenance costs.

Or I can't call my power company and Ask could you wait until I hit the next block to pay you?

I run 3 s-7's and 2 avalon 6's

  I use  5600watts  or 5.6 kwatts x 24 x 30 x .10 = 403.20 usd a month for power.   A steady payout of 0.13 btc a day makes for easy planing.

No variance and variance happens more often then you may like.

Thanks for the link

More transaction blocks is a very good start and it's most welcome. However SPV blocks are, by their nature, unverified blocks and can lead to invalid forks running away. Admittedly only the pools stuck on the invalid side of the fork are affected, but since more than 50% of the pools out there are SPV mining on initial block change, the bulk of the hashrate could be going the wrong way for a while before it's recognised.

That's interesting.  I still don't understand why so many people like that pool other than constant finds.

I've explained a bit here:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.13151453

This may sound like an ignorant question, but can someone actually explain this in simple terms.  I have a descent grasp on it but I still do not completely understand and I have a descent size home farm.  I did see where a new guy asked on the first page of the thread for a simplified explanation. 

I think that educating the miners could also be beneficial, I tend to stay on the smaller pools for some of the reasons mentioned but would still appreciate it if someone could just lay this out as simple as possible. Maybe Kano or Philipma

Thanks in advance....

Guys f2pool has said he will effort less empty blocks.

lets see if antpool does the same.

if both pools do it  it is a big deal.

It will take a week to clock blocks to be pretty sure if the effort is legit.

I respect f2pool for saying he is making the effort.

Lets remember we are sharing a golden goose here.  lets not tear it apart.

If both antpool and f2pool reduce the empty blocks by 50% over the next week it is a start in a good direction.

Even if they are doing it by flipping a switch SPV on odd days no SPV on even days.  

It is a push to help rather then a fuck you attitude.  

 While not prefect it would greatly reduce the problem If they just did that simple move.

Mining blocks is not cheap.  Miners/pools deserve to be paid for their work.

I did not know that less fee in the transaction takes longer to process.

What's strange about that?

Just looked Antpool got a few 25.0000  blocks.

Yep. It took like 12 hours more me. For me it was no big deal, just some change.
I think it's strange how transactions get processed due to the amount of the fee in there.

Also, that 1 transaction is only the newly generated coins.
Really stupid.

We should hire some suicide bombers that will collapse their farms, thats all...They will be paid in Bitcoin no worry, it will be anonymous

On a serious note, I think if they do that, the other 78% will retaliate or something...An accident happen so fast heh...

I also have a transaction that isn't confirming. I paid the fees the client suggested. Weird.

If anyone's curious: https://blockchain.info/tx/78fb4bb40720619d45a2f6506591628ffacac4c70e48a5b88d1cfbdbd07dc9bf

Well, unfortunately, it's either SPV+Empty blocks, or not SPV
So would you like to expand on your comment please?
I would hope you weren't also producing unnecessary Empty blocks after the SPV block change empty blocks?

Aside: On the other hand Empty blocks can be (and are also) produced by pools that are presumably not SPV mining ... e.g. Eligius

Also, in case the idea meandered through your mind, if you are just throwing in some extra transactions you are yourself generating to hide the empty blocks, it will be obvious.

Thank you I appreciate an effort on your part.

Hopefully  other SPV miners will follow suite.

FYI, we have just updated the pool software to reduce the number of empty blocks. The effectiveness is yet to be evaluated, but I think it should help a lot.

This is one issue I see with SPV.

I will write up like this.  There is a river people need to cross it.  So the King gave my fleet of boats 50 coins for making the trip empty or full.  I was happy so I sailed boats to get my 50 coins from the king.  As time went on people said wow I can cross the river on one of phils boats really cheap.

I got a tiny fee from the passengers but still got that 50 coins from the king.  So I got me a lot of boats  and my golden haired Norwegian relatives got in on the deal so we had 3 big fleets of boats  and control 60 percent between us.  While we are 3 separate fleets of boats we are countrymen and look out for each other.

The king see many boats crossing with lots of commerce his kingdom is growing.  He decides to cut the coin fee subsidy to the boat owners from 50 to 25.  Me and my two Norwegian countrymen see an opportunity.  We can send some empty boats faster then full ones thus collect 25 coins faster then others.. At the same time this empty boat deal makes for less space on the entire  set of all boats crossing.   So since we control 60% of the boats between us  we all decide to charge any passenger  0.0002 coins a trip essentially we are hurting quite a few people by this action.

This is one problem from SPV mining.

Forks soft forks and etc are more complex to explain but Kano can tell you how my boats could decide to cross a different river like we once did back in the summer of 2015 almost crashing all the boats since the fork was on the wrong side.

I am making it amusing but I am pissed at this.  Basically   I like to use those Norwegian fleets  f2pool was my favorite pool to mine.  I would do really high variable mining on solo.ckpool and on mmpool.org    then balance it with 0 variable pool like f2pool.  No can do since I now see a rocky road with SPV EMPTY BLOCK MINIG.  I may need to stop at antpool and a few others.

This is an easy fix  and or compromise and it is not being done.

here is one fix spilt the baby
 miners can do 1 day on an spv pool and 2 days on a none spv pool  =   really easy fix here. 

I now have 20 th on non- svp pools and 8.5th on spv pools

In simple terms the SVP pools want to push higher transaction fees for when bitcoin go to 12.5.
The SVP is taking more then normal empty blocks to do this?

and that is one of the points that are bad about SPV mining from any bigger pool (10% of the pie)

SPV mining =  empty blocks and the bigger you are the more empty blocks you can do.  SO  you can falsely drive transaction fees up up and away.

This has yet to really be easy to see but when the reward drops to 12.5 coins  big pools looking for cash can simply say the fee is 0.0005  or  0.0008  and you will be pressed to the wood to move coins.

The entire reason for mining is transactions.

So what has  happened here.  Is a few pools that were big kept block size small to raise fees more and now are keeping blocks empty to raise fees more.  The goose does not need to be cut open to get more golden eggs.
 
By my rough quess In the last 10 days there have been over 100 empty blocks.

This is  .2 coins a block or 20 full coins tossed for speed.  20 coins that pool ops could have or paid out to their miners.

Yep thanks for the info.

Yep, I am moving from it too...
They are threatning bitcoin's future

Up the fee you pay on your transaction later and it will be confirmed faster

Your tx has been manually confirmed by us in block 388010.

So I will need to a just  what  I did some fromantic last time. Thanks for the info.
Learning  new stuff all the time.

I would STRONGLY advise all miners to move away from any SPV pool, not just f2pool.

Depends on how busy the network is and the fee you used.
Since F2Pool put up their fee level, you might find that is part of the cause yes.

I remember when this happened a while back when the ghash.io pool had grown to large proportions and was threatening (or did) have over 50% of the staking power. People were up in arms about the whole matter and I remember many suspecting that they were doing 51% attacks or some other nonsense. Although You are right it is likely best that we distribute the hashing power rather than all lump to one pool, Granted that people are greedy.

What other alternatives exist for people to mine at?

could this why i cant get a Transaction completed?

https://blockchain.info/tx/eeecfa55cf46c03d523c3a33c729e9a3b18c97987c24adb162ffffa1d03d9fca

Slightly, ok, I'm 247ms ahead.
So I presume you are implying that it takes longer than that on average to get to your china node?
How much longer?
Double that? Yeah lets take a ridiculously high silly guess of 500ms.
That would mean that your SPV empty block changes are about 250ms faster than kano.is fully verified transaction block changes.

So the security of the bitcoin network and the risk of damaging the future of the bitcoin network is worth less than 250ms?

Well you're the one who listed the site not me
He's not SPV mining from data at kano.is ... though if you can find where he has said he is SPV mining (like you have stated regularly) on any server anywhere I'll gladly block his pool statistics miner also.

Heh now resorting to stupid comments because your SPV excuses are actually not valid

Lightsword’s poolbench server is located in the U.S. that is why you have a slightly better benchmark. And I recommend you block their IP 104.236.153.108 as well, because it is also “dead mining” on your pool. In that case, you’ll have infinite seconds that must be better than us all.

Don't you see where the non-us f2pool stratum is?

I think you are refering http://poolbench.antminer.link/ Didn’t you see stratum-us.f2pool.com:3333 is the number 1?

Those stats are provided by someone who recently helped you configure your network

Why don’t you benchmark on your mining server itself? Otherwise your block change could be 0.0000000000000 seconds.

Transactions with average fees were sitting in the mempool waiting for a block.
F2pool chose to mine empty blocks rather than allow the transactions to be processed.
Almost Half of the empty blocks mined in the past 24 hours were mined by F2pool

Lulz you do realise how silly that comment is right?

You mine something like 40x the number of blocks kano.is does.

Guess what? Yes you confirm more transactions that kano.is does.

Wow that was unexpected ... ... ... ... ...

Try supplying some statistically useful information next time like your average block size or average number of transactions per block.
You know, the actual information that's relevant.

Here's some useful information
Last 80 block changes, comparing the time a pool found it vs the time other pools did their block change (seconds):
Yeah that says that kano.is, that does FULL block verification and produces blocks with transactions every time, put out the block change work FASTER than stratum.f2pool.com, that is SPV mining empty blocks.

Why are you SPV mining?
Seems you want to confirm an average LESS transactions per block.

What some people said in this thread not true. Only data tells, top 20+ blocks with the most transactions were all mined by F2Pool. Top 1000+ blocks with the largest size in bytes were also all mined by F2Pool. We are helping the network a lot by confirming far less spams in compare to other pools. We do mine a small number of empty blocks, but despite of that, you tx is still most likely to be confirmed by our pool than, say, Kano’s. As our great leader Chairman Xi has taught us: 「有些吃飽了撐的沒事幹的歪果仁，對我們的事情指手畫腳。我們一不輸出革命，二不輸出飢餓和貧困，三不去折騰你們，你們還有什麼好說的？」

Phil I agree with most of your points.
F2pool has been selective of the transactions they will process, and mining empty blocks means they have selected 0 for that block.
Their reasoning is because they are behind the GFW, but look at the pools running CKpool. They are not only mining blocks with large amounts of transactions they are doing it as fast as every SPV mining pool but one and with less orphans than the others, much larger pools. This is absolute proof you can mine without using SPV mining methods, or blocks with zero transactions and still make the coin you should be making and in many cases much more. I have long been a ckpool software supporter and learning these things justified my choices.

I think the truth will be even harder for zero transaction pools to deny after the halving. Whether they continue to only care about the block reward over the health and security of the network, well I believe they will. I think the 12.5 will still be way more important because even though the transaction fees would rise in a natural progression because of the nature of how it was originally set up and has been maintained, it still offers them much more greed satisfaction when submitting solved blocks.

I think they are going for as much control so that when the halving occurs they can set the rate for transactions, as you said, but I also think they will take every opportunity to continue zero block transactions unless they are able to cause a huge price increase for a transaction to be processed.

Many miners do not yet see what F2pool and antpool are doing today which is to control as much of the network as possible so they may dictate the rules and future bitcoin core BIPs.
With all of my heart I believe these pools work in collusion to control the network.

I remember macbook-air posting he received a phone call within a few minutes of antpool and f2pool building on the wrong fork during the fork of july when they were pumping out more blocks on the wrong fork. He said it was a call from antpool. They already have a hotline setup to assist each other if their SPV mining causes another issue, so why would anyone think they aren't working together to exercise even more control in other ways? 60% of the bitcoin network is an enormous amount. We should consider why Kano said he will never allow more than 10% of the network at kano.is
Who has bitcoin's best interests at heart from that statement alone?

It is sad f2pool refuse to meet honest miners at a sit down to discuss this and other illegal items like denial of service threats.

I sincerely hope there is not a question in anyone's mind regarding the end game of these pools. Control and currency. That is all that matters to them. It will be a sad day to see the entire bitcoin network placed in harm's way because together F2pool and antpool will ruin mining for everyone simply based on the greed mining methods they employ.

A very sad day to see them controlling so much of the bitcoin network hash, and it will catch up to them, no matter the cost in underhanded methods they will continue and will receive too much attention.

I have been thinking that the 1/2 ing will alter this behaviour.

12.5 coins per block will mean fees are more important.

If I win a block with 25.1 coins including fees.  The fees come to .4%

If I win a block with 12.9 coins including fees. The fees come to .8%

I think this issue may really change in July.
My fear is the pools will reject more transactions by wanting even higher fees.
I stopped mining at f2pool after studying the issues.
I may need to sell off my s-7 hash at ant pool since ant pool is making a shit ton of empty blocks.

I will need to study this more.

In the F2pool thread macbook-air(the person responsible for the antics at F2pool / discus fish and moderator of the F2pool thread) has selectively been deleting my posts.

The last ones he made an announcement that he was pruning anyone with a "red" trust rating, which dogie has left me neg trust because I called him out for several things, including the advice he gave to someone who recently purchased an S7 miner to only use 2 plugs per hash card which is a strict warranty violation. He told someone to do something which can cancel their warranty and if they had any kind of power issue it would be completely obvious what had been done. The guy just plain gives bad advice to many new miners and before I became involved with the SPV mining / empty block cause I was debating him and his antics so he left me bad trust. Every single person I have done deals with from OGnasty to Finsky, sidehack, phillip and so many others know how trustworthy I am so it isn't ever that I would be concerned about anyone doing business with me.
Then macbook deletes my posts, even the ones where I politely asked him to have a meeting with reputable members of the forum such as CK and Kano to discuss SPV and empty block mining and how it is harming the network.

The only reason any negative trust rating from dogie would ever bother me is if a nub who isn't familiar with dogie's bad advice took my trust rating as something they should go by when everyone knows how dogie is. Everyone knows he doesn't put any effort into research and has little electrical experience. He quotes numbers from manufacturers he likes.

Now I'd be wiling to bet he PMd macbook and offered that piece of advice.

But I don't care, and I will continue to warn people among my many other efforts against F2pool. I do not consider everyone who mines there an idiot as it is obvious to me many people just do not know, or do not understand what they are doing and how bad it is.

Unfortunately, there are also many people who do know, and continue out of greed. However nothing will deter people from learning and making a conscious decision to stay there or move to other pools.

Today I saw posts from new miners with many terahash who simply did not understand and after a bit of talking they did their own looking around, they checked previous posts by other forum members, and they went online to count the empty blocks for themselves when we had a huge backlog in the mempool and those smart new miners picked up right away what was going on and moved to kano.is.

That is exactly what is so fantastic about bitcoin. Each miner can have an impact with their hashrate.

Someone asked Johnybravo today about this. They said what can they do to help remove support from F2pool and Johny told them, you already have. When you move your hashrate to a pool who doesn't practice these things which harm bitcoin you have shown them. Believe it, every terahash counts and shows them we are not going to take this.

We are not going to continue to allow F2pool to hurt bitcoin. Things are looking bright and our baby is walking, albeit with trembling steps at times, and even with pools like F2pool who are so greedy and self-absorbed they will do anything to take, take, and take again by pushing the baby down, our little toddler jumps back up with each miner who pulls support from their evil, destructive grasp.

Tell your friends, tell everyone you know involved in bitcoin in any way, and push on because every miner and user needs your help. The only way bitcoin can succeed in the mainstream is if we show the world the bad actors are under control, the network is secure, and you can mine, buy, and spend bitcoin all day everyday without fear some evil Chinese pool is going to destroy what so many people have lived to build.

See my sig for details regarding how F2pool is threatening to send denial of service attacks to a small pool which will harm every miner in that pool.

Remember, this is a vote, and vote with your power no matter how big or small. Then they will listen, or go down, but you have the power to make it happen, even with very little hashrate, you can do it.

I like smaller  pools  and rather help them out and keep the mining  spread  out.

This is going to become a huge problem, if it isn't already. Miner pools/farms with lot of power are going to define terms on how its going to be and NO miners won't join the smaller pools, they want their ROI and don't care about what happens to future of Bitcoin. And the image above shows that not only them some of the others are doing it too.

Sorry mikefallen... could you add a little explanation to your post?
As I'm rather new and inexperienced I don't get what you mean by your images.

edit: explained below, thanks bitbaby

One of the 2 biggest pools, F2Pool, that controls over 22% of the Bitcoin hashrate (over 22% for the past month), is directly threatening Bitcoin's future.

Hash rates for the past month:
https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/pools?resolution=1m

Firstly the obvious discussion about SPV mining and risking forks of the network.

Secondly, that SPV mining is generating empty blocks that confirm no new Bitcoin transactions.

Thirdly, they have now increased the transaction fee they use to accept transactions.

Result, one of the biggest Bitcoin pools, over 22% of Bitcoin blocks, is, again, reducing the amount of transactions they will accept.


Now if every F2Pool block was full, you could indeed argue that they are not reducing the number of transactions Bitcoin can support, but no that is not the case with F2Pool.

Seriously, people need to stop mining there and mine at some other smaller pool, for the sake of the future of Bitcoin.

Don't mine at my pool if you don't like me. I'm fine with that. But pick another smaller pool, not F2Pool