Topic: Pool hopping... ethical or not? - page 9. (Read 25031 times)

You're wrong, but thanks for proving my point about the existing confusion.

Tell me this. Let's say the proportional pool has (2*difficulty) shares in the current round. If you mine for it now, then no matter what happens, you will get less than (Block reward)/(2*difficulty) per share you submit. So why do it instead of, say, a PPS pool which gives you (Block reward)/(1.1*difficulty) per share you submit?

alright, I read the info and I think this is a myth.  The first strategy is to mine until 43.5% then hop off the pool and solo mine?

At the current difficulty, you have a 0.001239% (rounded) probability of finding a block within 10 minutes at 300 MH/s.  So basically you're wasting time that you could have spend contributing to the pool and getting a higher split.  Then if you beat the pool and find the block solo, you get 50 BTC but lose all the progress in the current pool.  And that's like betting on red and black at the roulette table except if the payments were less than your bet.  One is going to lose and you're betting your mining time on opposites.  If you thought you could beat the pool solo, you should solo the entire time.

The same goes for mining until 43.5% of what I assume is the estimated completion time of a block since there is no "progress" or "completion percentage."  You bet on two pools, only one can win, you're losing your mining time on whatever pool loses.  It doesn't seem logical.

Oops.


The mining halting is really the function of the optimal hopping strategy. In poker playing the perfect strategy is close to impossible, but if everyone did, the situation would be close - everyone would win and lose the same on average.

Arbitrage trading actually helps consolidate markets.

@Meni & Mikes: Agreed, I see openly pool hopping as a form of hacktivism. If we could get rid of bad ideas 100% of the time by simply talking about them I'd be all for it, but some folks won't listen to words and actions speak louder. If other miners at a pool feel any pain from my actions they should take their complaints to the pool operator who should have been using a fair system in the first place. If they don't feel any pain then they either aren't affected by my actions in a meaningful way or else have no comprehension whatsoever about how mining works and should perhaps pick another business.

Saying hopping is unfair to those who stick with one pool is like saying that arbitrage is unfair to those who stick with one exchange. If you don't like it, there are certainly ways to close the loophole and you'd be better served complaining to those with the power to do so than going after the arbitrageur. Mining is a business and you are all my competitors. If Target found a way to profit 20% more in a way that would possibly hurt Wal Mart's profits, would it be unethical to do so? I think you're all confusing personal ethics, social ethics and business ethics.

Proportional. PPS is something else entirely.

So it's not like Poker at all. You can still play poker if everyone knows the odds, you can't mine in prop if everyone hops.

In my opinion, the near-perfect analogy to pool-hopping is a game of poker where some people know the odds and the others don't. The ones with the knowledge (who put it to use) have a clear advantage.

Similarly, in both cases, the more people maximize their expected value by playing the odds optimally, the less there is to win. Ultimately, if everyone pool-hopped, the PPS pools would simply halt and the EV would drop to 0.

Pooled mining is an agreement among miners to jointly work on finding blocks and splitting the rewards in proportion to the contribution of each, with the pool operator as middleman. Pool-hopping is an attempt to gain more than the fair share of a pool's rewards for the work done, breaching the agreement, and as such is unethical.

The claim that "people were warned and still mine for proportional pools, so they consent to it" is understandable, but problematic because:
1. Not everyone reads the forum. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the users of Deepbit have never looked at its forum thread. You are taking advantage of those users who don't know any better.
2. Pool-hopping is hard enough to understand as it is. I think there is virtually nobody who has commented about the statistical properties of mining and isn't guilty of having made an error at some point. Add to it the people who actively deny that it works or is harmful to honest miners (rarer these days) and the FUD against hopping-proof methods, and an average miner doesn't know if to believe Random Internet User A or Random Internet User B. It is clear that anyone would avoid proportional pools if he had a good understanding of pool-hopping and the alternatives, so staying with the pool should not be seen as consent to pool-hopping.

However.

It is clear that the real problem is not with the hoppers, but with the pool operators who allow this to happen and deceive their customers. Abstaining from hopping will not solve the problem, as there will always be those won't even be bothered by the question of whether this is ethical, and silently eat at the due rewards of miners.

The only way to expose the corrupt proportional pools for what they really are is to openly mount a massive pool-hopping attack, demonstrating a statistically significant drop in the payouts of honest miners. One would hope that this will create an outcry leaving operators with no other choice than to back down and adopt an unbroken scoring method (such as PPLNS). To the extent that openly pool-hopping helps bring about this brighter future, I would say that it is acceptable.

Why? because eskimo bob came up with a way to try to deduct funds from addresses first?

Do you feel like crap after pool hopping?
Do you feel an evil joy from pool hopping?
Do you feel cheated, my dear honest miner?
Do you feel like your pool got abused (or did you do some selfabusing in the pool... oops)?

No problem my dear friend, let me fix that for you!

Transfer some coin to: 1Kae8NWf1pKsadDu53E9GeRo6pN9c4hrgy and you will feel better. Instantly!
 
PS! If you do not feel better after the transfer, you did not transfer enough bitcoins. Transfer more and see what happens.

BTW, think happy thoughts while you send me your bitcoin! 

/fixed

Some are stupid enough to stay in the pool though and then complain that others aren't.

If the pool pays out based on the number of shares accumulated prior to finding a block, once the pool has accumulated a certain number of shares towards finding a block without finding one, a pool hopper can be sure that any additional share he submits before the pool finds a block will yield him a below-average payout.

The implied agreement is, as it always is, that all miners will interact in good faith with each other and deal fairly with each other. This is understood to be an implied portion of any agreement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_covenant_of_good_faith_and_fair_dealing

Show me someone who understands what pool hopping is who insists that it consists of interacting fairly with the other miners and contributing in good faith to their cooperative effort and I'll show you a liar.

Here's one link. I'll leave it to you to find the rest.

https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=3165.0

I read something about this but didn't get it.  Each individual miner or even calculation has the exact same probability of forming a block as anyone else's.  There is no progress either.  How would switching to a different pool help?  You can't just jump in and say oh well my pool just finished so I'm gonna get on this one cuz it's close to being done.  It doesn't work like that.  Where's the math to back this up as being advantageous?

Was being a bit sarcastic.  
Making fun of this mystical implied agreement out there: one "against" pool hopping and you obtaining one "for" pool hopping.

sorry not getting the circularity.

1. I'm telling them I hop.
2. I'm telling them it costs them if I hop.
3. I suggest they tell the pool to be hopper proof.
4. They don't do anything about it.

If there are no rules against it and if full time miners don't mind what I do after explaining the situation to them, then how can what I do be unethical.

I hope I've explained it better this time, and less circularly.

edit: Thanks bb. I always did want to be absolute. And circular, i guess.

This is wrong.


@ organofcorti:

Yes, yes, here's your absolution already. Now feel better.


Also, there are no implied agreements.

OMG!!! Are they implicitly agreeing to let you pool-hop? Well then, you have got youself an implied agreement!!
Oh wait, that's circular, isn't it? Crap... Opps...

What is the implied agreement here?  I bet you for every miner you will have another version.  If 100% of pool users don't agree with it, then there is no such agreement.  only what is present here, debates about it.  As opposed to a pool operator creating an agreement for all to abide by...