Topic: Pool Operators - PLEASE BAN & BLOCK GPUMAX getwork/proxy access to your pool (Read 13685 times)

as predicted before I stopped reading the fud in this thread, its almost over
topic from #gpumax
pirateat40> GPUMAX will be down on 10/08 at 12:00 AM CST.  The system may or may not come back up depending on the new owners.

miners (for their own reasons) have already been leaving gpumax too

hopefully the pools forum can gt back to pools
oh
wait
it cant
bonuspool is the new hot topic 

I'm just sick of seeing this thread popup on the pools support board.

Wow, just read the whole thread as I use GPUMAX. I was curious about arguments against GPUMAX mining.

My conclusion: a bunch of crybabies that believed in Santa Claus want other people to punish the man for them. So this is about setting up a lynch mob basically. And a pointless one at that: if some of what I read is true, pirateat40 is on top of 500,000 BTC from his scam. If people think that crashing GPUMAX into the ground is going to make any difference, they are down right delusional (as you must have been to believe in a sustainable weekly 7% interest).

As GPUMAX pays regularly the risk of being scammed is very low so I'll continue mining on it, carefully monitoring expected income/actual income. If you really want me to stop, put a similar service up to compete against it or make law enforcement close the service (assuming the law is on your side on this one, good luck with that) otherwise get lost. You already have the legal means to make yourself heard and seek compensation so use them: I'm not part of your personal vendetta squad. In fact in some jurisdictions free market laws make what has been asked here illegal (the irony!).

Miners at GPUMAX don't owe these people anything and personally I don't care about their problems.

Sorry I was referring to PPS rates to miners.

Like Graet was saying not many people use it on his pool - I think that holds true mostly for everyone now considering how little public work is being done on the proxy now.  You can more or less effectively "block" this service by not having a proportional pool or just convince people to stop rolling the dice and purchasing the service.

I'm in the process of slowly moving off the service myself simply because the amount of public work I get is next to nil and now there isn't really much of a point any more, however I am not doing this because I feel I was cheated or anything.

Why aren't they paying more what? And to whom?

So I've been browsing through here, I find the whole crusade against GPUMAX a little pointless.  Why not ban all proxy pools? What is being asked of pool operators is totally unreasonable in the sense that it can hurt their regular miners (blocking wrong ips etc).  I got caught up in the whole BCTST deal with a pass through losing a massive 20 coins.  Frankly I couldn't care, this service is something different from BTCST so I treat it that way.  I've been using GPUMAX for the last few months and the going is good, granted it has slowed down a lot recently.  As long as there are people purchasing shares (and proportional pools) there will always be work.  Can I tell if the owners are taking a few shares off the top? Honestly not really.  What I do know is that I've always been making more than straight mining somewhere without it.

Why not ask: Pool owners why aren't you paying more? But we all know the answer to that, it's unreasonable to expect them to pay higher rates and not be sustainable.

Do you happen to still have some record of the payout address used?

Good luck on that.

This kind of blocking is almost impossible to do.
GPUMax can just change a few networking things (re-routing/default gateways/vpn/proxies/etc) to hit the pools from a varied range of IPs...
I'm still hopping that Pirate will pay back all the money.

Best!
Thiago

I actually stopped using mine because it was causing all sorts of problems with miners dropping out...

I fiannly got a GPUMAX invite the other week... don't think I'll be taking it up.

So because you didn't, that must mean everyone else feels the same way? Most people like getting paid extra. I would have at least sold the account if I didn't want to use it. That's another 5 btc right there.

? I don't, never did... I put my email in that thing to see how long it took to get an invite. Never used it.

There has a been a long waiting list to get a gpumax account. Not sure how you conclude people must not want accounts from that.

Why doesn't the majority of the bitcoin network mine with gpumax? To a lot it's very unattractive..

Why would anyone want to earn less by not using gpumax? It's not possible to lose money on it. Even if he stole a days worth of mining, which would be extremely unlikely. Customers would still have earned more then elsewhere. You guys decided to take the risk of investing in something that had ponzi written all over it. The only person you should be mad at is yourselves.

As confirmed above, it was GPUMAX (or pirate40, to be precise - even tho I have no real proof for that) that was pool-hopping us, using his own account (registered with a fake e-mail of course).

Hmm.. interesting. Was he hopping with it, or just mining nonstop? Either way, it strongly supports my theory that gpumax' biggest customer was pirate himself.

I can write the short version of the story:

* I detected a huge increase in hashrate on our pool, and traced it back to GPUMAX (nothing strange there, so far, I've had heard about the service before)
* I checked which account it was mining against (and found that it was a private account by pirate40 (or who ever was/is behind GPUMAX))
* All mining-activity related to that account came directly from the same IP-addresses as GPUMAX used at the time.
* I spoke with pirate40 (I guess?) a year ago or so, in their official IRC channel regarding what was going on, and why he was using his "own" account to mine at our pool, with GPUMAX resources
* He pretty much asked me to fuck off and mind my own business, as he said he didn't do anything "wrong", it was some "load balancing between multiple pools"-feature he said.
* ... which still didn't explain why he was using his own account, and sending the earned funds directly to him self (Or well, his "personal" wallet, i think the IP was showing up on blockchain.info) - Not to anything related to GPUMAX as far as i could see.
* He wrote a few lines privately to me on IRC "trying" to explain "again", but at this time i was so suspicious that i doubted every word he said.
* I asked him a day later, again on exactly what was going on, and he mentioned the same thing about it was a load-balancing between pools - but i didn't really get how exactly his account and his IP became involved in everything - i asked why he was using his "own" account for it - but never got any response.
* I suspected, back then, that he was taking a bit of "extra" hashrate and mined (pool-hopped) to compensate for the 105% earnings (or whatever it was) and to earn some for himself. (Which i honestly still think)
* I issued a firewall ban against all EC2 nodes i could find, associated with GPUMAX, and disabled all related accounts.

Those bans maybe not be effective anymore, things might have changed during the past years, but i know that he disabled https://www.bitlc.net (Bitcoins.lc) on GPUMAX and posted an announcement of it here on the forums.

I never heard from him again.

--
Regards, Jim
Bit LC Inc.
https://www.bitlc.net