Topic: Fascinating what Michael Deletes [BTCguild 90% luck and dropping] - page 4. (Read 4231 times)

Doing nothing is pretty much the definition of not caring wouldn't you say?

On a more serious note, if you are unable to actively detect miners performing a block withholding attack on the pool, then Con is right, the era of public pools is over.  Unscrupulous commercial miners will destroy the public pools to eliminate competition from small players.

So what have you done to verify the pool isn't being exploited?

This is true.  But wouldn't hundreds of users coming from the same IP block raise it's own set of flags?  I would expect that existing DDOS defenses would ban somebody trying that approach right away.

A pool might have a few IPs like that due to hosting providers but a few phone calls would validate those.  

Yes, fascinating that I deleted the posts that contributed nothing constructive, and decided to imply that I simply don't care, or am too lazy to do anything, and also include a dollar figure for income that was pulled directly out of your ass as well.



This.  Additionally, you can't send a "prove you're not evil" work packet to miners in stratum.  Every miner has a unique ExtraNonce1, so they will never overlap their hash results.

What you describe is not dissimilar to what I just said. However:
Step one biggest problem already. Your miners need to have had more than 1 diff's change worth of shares to even begin calling them unlucky. So they need to submit 8 billion diff1 equivalent shares. The miners would need to be hundreds of terrahash before you even accumulate any significant data to even make this call, and then if they split their mining into multiple workers, you will never get 8billion shares like I said.

I would think you could detect someone performing a block withholding attack on the pool through a simple test:

First identify your 'unluckiest' participants.  Then when a block is solved, immediately send the work unit for the block to those miners.  If they consistently fail to return the winning solution you know they are ripping you off.

There are a number of other attacks that could be detected with similar approaches.

What's troubling to me is the massive asymmetry of risks right now.  The miners on BTCguild have over $50M in hardware investments that is depreciating at 25% / month .  I'd be shocked if Micheal has $50k in total in hardware to run the pool.

My personal theory has been mentioned already:


Startup 42e1 spends $2M on design and masks to build out their $5M 2Ph/s mine only to discover that the design has a flaw that prevents it from finding nonces with difficulties over 4.2 billion.  It still hashes lots of results below that level, so instead of scrapping things they move all their machines off the internal pool to a big public pool.


There are many, many other reasons someone could be maliciously attacking a pool, and the stakes keep getting larger.  If you're operating a public pool and not actively developing defenses, you will be burned.

And personally if I was clearing $250k / month off my pool, I wouldn't care what little people think either, but I would pay somebody to care.

If a pool is large enough, then one can mine on it even with PPLNS and execute a block withhold attack and take the small pay hit it amounts to for the sake of preventing network diff from rising (the risk is far greater with PPS). This is the only realistic attack that could be taking place on this large a pool. Pool ops are obliged to audit their larger miners. Even auditing miners cannot protect you from this though since all they need to do is spread their mining between many accounts or just keep creating accounts to never have a significant amount of shares to raise suspicion. [NOTE: I am not saying there is a problem with btcguild]. The only way to audit this is to actually send suspicious miners work that is guaranteed to be solved and see what they do.

It's the vexing question of what miners should do about pooled mining which has for more to be concerned about than this one issue that is currently troubling btcguild members.

Mining doesn't lend itself to solo mining unless you have mega hashpower, but the larger a pool is the more risk you expose yourself and the bitcoin network to. P2pool is the obvious next step, but if that gets large enough then it's not much different to solo mining at lower diff. Clusters of smaller p2pools that feed into larger p2pool like set ups are the next obvious step.

However the number of miners is diminishing, and the amount of hashpower with each mining group (like KnC's farms) gets larger by the minute, and they'll probably all just run their own solo operations with time. Pooled mining as we currently know it may end up just being an interesting blip on the history of bitcoin mining.

I was disappointed to see Entropy-uc quoted with the original and relevant posts deleted because I appreciate and respect his opinion, so I'm glad he's made this thread.

I've been watching and biting my nails, I saw the beginning of the poor streak coming so I switched everything to PPS and lo-and-behold, next day PPS is gone and all my equipment was forced back to PPLNS.  BTCGuild has been very good to me for the last two years so I've held on hoping, but I'm getting the itchy feeling it's time to move on.  I've never seen the luck this bad, especially not in terms of the 3M indicator.  

I don't believe that Eleuthria is acting maliciously, but I agree that something doesn't feel right.  There was a very definitive drop in the average, and block count has been absolutely atrocious since.  Believe me, you're not the only one that's noticed and been watching closer than usual.

So it goes..   I tried to be the canary in the coal mine and then let the data over time speak for me but seems a few more months of this nonsense will have to pass for the sheep on that pool to get nervous

I thought these were pretty neutral points but apparently Michael has something to hide.


It's funny you mention poker.  I remember a friendly game once where I never seemed to get hands breaking the way you would expect from the odds.  So when the deal came around to me, I counted the deck.  There were only 46 cards in it!

Sometimes bad luck is bad luck.  But it never hurts to check.

Michael rakes ~$250k per month from this little game.  And his participants have been losing out on over $1.5M / month for the last 3+ months.  That calls for a LOT more diligence than a little hand waving about variance.  Bitcoin is a dirty business, with cheats and thieves always looking for a weakness to exploit.

I can think of half a dozen ways Michael could be testing for exploits that would explain the pools recent performance.  But he seems more interesting in collecting his rake and insulting anyone who asks reasonable questions.

It reminds me of how Deepbit disappeared from the pools list.  Tycho was too busy with hookers and blow to respond to his users, and in a year he went from the biggest pool, to non-existence.