Topic: Is it possible for a pool to steal your hashrate? (Read 1640 times)

yes, if you don't run your P2Pool node.

Don't forget next time you go to a shop, to walk out the door and not pay for anything you take or use.
That might stop them from stealing 'fees' from you.

They already do steal ur hashrate and ur ok with it. Its called a fee

sounds like ghash

On PPLNS you have to award people differently to take such advantages.

If everyone gets 90% shares then everyone will be paid the same.
The advantage of recording only 90% would be the pool would show their luck is, long term, ~10% higher ... well that depends on the actual luck, but anyway, it would show higher.
... but if no one is being paid according to the pool luck then that would easily point out the pool is doing something wrong.

The pool could increase their share counts for their own miners and thus increase their payout - but it would - again affect pool luck unless they only had tiny miners - and thus didn't steal much extra BTC.

On a PPS pool you get paid less if the pool accepts less shares, but then again, it's also pretty obvious since anyone can work out exactly what they should be paid on a PPS pool.

I think it would make more sense for a pool to simply report a lower number of accepted shares then what it is really receiving from your miners. Since they are awarding you less shares, they would owe you less when they find a block.

Another thing they could do would be to say they receive more shares then they really receive from their customers collectively. This would have the same effect as above. Both this and the above would be trivial for the pool and nearly impossible to detect verses redirecting hash rate to another pool.

All would simply be chalked up as bad luck by the pool. 

That's not to say that there aren't any trustworthy pools out there, there are, but IMHO there's not so many truly trustworthy pools to choose from out of the many available - with more springing up every week it seems. I spent weeks combing through this & other forums looking at different pools trying to decide what pool I felt comfortable using, & came to the same conclusion as you - p2pool seemed to be not only the safest, but also the decentralized nature of it appealed to me.

Although stealing hashrate is a grey area, I did find a case where a certain pool admin used their miners hash power to kill a coin by way of a 51% attack simply because he didn't like it. This was done without any consultation with the pools miners & without their knowing - which of course meant that that pool was immediately crossed of my list, you can read about it here:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/dead-coiledcoin-yet-another-cryptocurrency-but-with-opeval-56675

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3472/what-is-the-story-behind-the-attack-on-coiledcoin

Then of course there's the double spending attack done by another (very large at the time) pool:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ghashio-and-double-spending-against-betcoin-dice-327767

To me, the two examples above could be considered stealing, weather directly or indirectly. At the end of the day, if you're concerned about weather a pool will "steal" your hashing power it's safer & easier to use either p2pool or one of the very few reputable pools out there that provide not only open & transparent support, but do so in a timely manner. Doing plenty of pool research will pay dividends, I'm certainly glad I took the time to do so. One thing's for sure, biggest is by no means best.

So it is possible to steal hashrate.
What is worst, most people think it is not possible.
What is worst, if done in a stealth way it is nearly undetectable.
What is worst, I have never seen anybody suspicious of that.

Trust no one, p2pool it is for me then.

P2pool miners using their own local node not affected 

Unless you are examining the contents of your stratum data then you actually never know what you're hashing for. There is always an element of trust involved in mining on a pool. What address you're mining to can easily be changed by the pool.

you could be hijacked and pointed at other pools.  This has happened on occasion.

No & yes.

No for the reasons listed above.

Yes if they did it at a low enough level level the odds of getting caught are slim.

So if you had a 5 PH pool (5,000 TH) and scraped off 1/2 of 1% you would have 25TH to do with what you wanted to.
At the current price of BTC that would get you about $20,000 US a year.

I would say most miners don't actually monitor that closely to ever see that small an amount being taken. And most don't know how to monitor the connection to the pool to actually see what is happening. They plug in their miners, point to a pool and hope for the best.

-Dave

Plus even if it was possible a pool getting caught doing this would be out of business.  I don't think they would risk that.

Not possible. Mining address can be decoded from stratum job notification.

Would it be possible for a pool to use your hashrate somewhere else, fooling miners and blaming luck?