Topic: Ripped off by a pool? (Read 6459 times)

You joined another pool.

Is there any difference in pools by it's type? E.g. I'm using CPU mining client and it shows me 52553 khash/s with 40 clients now. Are GPU-clients mininng on another pool instance on the server?

I joined the mining pool yesterday evening. Today I received 2.47 BTC. That's actually pretty quick.

I called myself cautiously optimistic. The qualifier is crucial. I don't see how useful it is to assume honest actors; this is not the case that matters. The trust models that are currently being used by this community will not scale. The time to tackle these issues is now, not later.

of course you can be scammed, you'll always need to trust a pool-admin.

but i wasn't talking about greedy, dishonest people,
just about the advantage of pooled mining, expecting an honest admin.

almost anyone seems to trust the admins of MyBitcoin, MtGox, or other services,
which hold a lot more coins than any of the (2) pools we've seen so far ever generated.
why not trust a pool-admin the same way?
at least give him a few days of "trust in advance", so he can get everything sorted and the system running.

the topic starter doesn't and still calls himself optimistic.
 

So it isn't worth discussing? I thought this was a technical forum.

I'm cautiously optimistic, but I know that the wild-west atmosphere that will soon surround this emerging technology is going to nourish some nasty characters. Guaranteed.

Sheep go with the group and don't ask hard questions. Sheep then get slaughtered.

If this early adoption cohort takes things seriously, then bitcoin might have a chance to change the world. If not, well... things like this don't always get second chances to succeed. Powerful people are watching this closely and are looking for cracks.

Yes, you can be scammed. I absolutely accept that people does not trust pool operator. It is their freedom of choice and Bitcoin is about freedom. I made pooled service with rising difficulty on mind, because I'd like to return my investment to mining hardware. Those periodic micropayments are lowering my own personal risk which I put in bitcoin idea. There were a days when I did not find a block even with strongest GPU on the market, which personally made me uncomfortable.

Do you really think if slush was retaining a percentage of the earned bitcoins for himself people would stop using the pool? I mean officially retaining, of course.


There is this quote by George Bernard Shaw: "A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it."

i can see your point, although i don't really get it.

on one hand you say, you get a chance to get paid much more,
on the other hand you say, from the mathematical point of view, the average expected payout is exactly the same.

what is it now, much more, or exactly the same?
obviously it's the same, the bad side of standalone-mining (at least for low-power-contributors) is,
that you risk to lose it all and get nothing in the end.
in the pool you get the same payout, in form of micropayments, but without the risk to lose it.

except for the thrill, there's nothing to win in standalone-mining, but a few coins to lose.

anyway, as long as you push power to the network, no matter how tiny it is, no matter if pooled or not,
you'll help make our system stronger.

happy crunching. 

A small chance, yes, but to get paid much more.

I agree that pooled mining is more predictable and less random. But from the mathematical point of view, the average expected payout is exactly the same regardless of assumptions about hashspeed and growth rate.

If you like a constant stream of micropayments, pooled mining is for you. If you prefer the thrill of getting a block by yourself, do it the standalone way.

Standalone is like betting on a roulette. Except there is no casino that takes its cut. All the winning are distributed fairly. The thrill of gambling for just the cost of electricity

that's the point and the big difference between pooled- and standalone-mining.

pools == get payed for the work you do. you will get payed, guaranteed
standalone == get a tiny chance to get payed

Probability distribution changes with pooled mining but the average expected mining income does not. No matter what your mining speed is and what your time frame is. If you have a slow CPU miner from which you can get only a 1 BTC a month from pooled mining (and less when the difficulty increases), you have 2% chance of getting 50 BTC in the same time frame (actually you have an average payment of 1 BTC, you have a slightly less than 2% chance of getting 50 BTC but also some chance of getting 100, 150 BTC, etc. )

The "benefit" depends on what you like. Some people would rather have a 1 BTC than a 2% chance of getting 50 BTC. But others would rather have a chance of winning more than get pennies. Millions of people spend a few dollars to get a tiny chance of winning a million in lotteries (even though the expected payment is negative). 


That's true. But there will be some CPU-miners who will win 50 BTC on their own, an amount they would never get from pooled mining. And the average of winnings of those lucky and unlucky is the same as the average income from pooled mining.

depends on your processing-power (except for a very very long term, like decades at least).

if you try mining on a common CPU, you probably won't be able to contribute that much power to the pool, to earn you 5BTC within 2weeks,
most CPUs already need a year or longer on average to generate 1 block, at current difficulty, which will rise within that year.
so most CPU-miners won't generate any bitcoins on their own, ever!

within the pool those miners will not get 5BTC in a week or two, maybe a few cents, or only sub-cents, which isn't much, but far more than they could ever generate on their own.

if you really think, you could do it on your own, give it try, i bet you'll give up in a few weeks, or months without getting anything.

the/a pool is your only chance to get at least something back for contributing your CPU to the network, even if it's just a few bitcents, it's still better than nothing.
you won't make profit anyway, except for the unlikely case that you get your energy for free.


for high-end ATI GPUs you might be right, at least while those are on their own able to generate a block a day, or every couple of days, but that will change too.

for CPUs it's either a few cents from the pool, or nothing at all.

No. In long term, there is no benefit of pooled mining. The only difference is reduced variance in the income stream. Yes, you can get, say, 5 BTC before difficulty gets higher with pooled mining but you have equivalently 10% chance of solving complete 50 BTC block before difficulty gets higher in standalone mining.

I cannot do this. Mining is not exact and I cannot pay out you forward, before we find a block. EDIT: There is only some chance that we will find block on every x shares. I cannot handle this risk and pay out per share.

For all - there is absolutely no other way than to trust me. Even opening sources will not solve this problem. If you don't trust me, you can leave the pool anytime. But you are welcome to join.

There is only one check, what everybody can do by himself. You can sum your reward from pool for long term (say few months) and sum your potential reward if you mine standalone. But if you make this calculation properly and will take into also rising difficulty, I'm pretty sure your reward from pooled mining will be higher, because you will receive more cents before difficulty goes higher every week.

I have an idea. Instead of paying by share of the block, the pool could pay a constant amount per share.

e.g slush's pool gives out work with difficulty 1 (I think), so on average there should be 12252.03471156 (current difficulty) shares per block. Each share is thus worth about 0.00408095 BTC, right?

So if the pool had enough BTC in reserve to cover statistical variation, he could just pay that much per share for every share, and you could verify that you're getting paid the right amount.

If this idea were implemented, theoretically on average the pool operator shouldn't make or lose any money (other than rounding errors). I'd be concerned about the chance of the pool possibly running out of money due to random variation, though.

This seems to be the most appropriate place to discuss various proposed modes of pool cheating and possible workarounds.

When I first heard of pools, I (along with many other, I am sure) immediately thought of the possibility of "micro-skimming." These are old attacks, but for a recent example, read the following link:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/ftc-sues-scammers

Some people seem to think that these attacks are a waste of time, because of the small amounts being stolen at a time -- and for a small number of transaction this is true. However, the attack scales well. In fact, it scales well in two ways: 1) the more people/transactions are involved, the more money you steal and 2) the easier it is to hide what you are doing since the skimmed amounts get "lost in the wash." As long as the attacker doesn't get too greedy, the attack is difficult to detect.

My suspicion was raised in part because payments were being made in some seemingly arbitrary way. In fact, the details of how this works in slush's pool remain unclear. I hope that by discussing various forms of the fraud discussed in the above linked article, we can perhaps develop some resistant method by which we can minimize or eliminate the possibility of such attacks. How would you design a pool to cheat people out of money?

As of now, it seems easy to lie about the number of total work units required to solve a block. There is nothing to prevent the pool operator to open a few accounts and attributing some modest number of work to those accounts, increasing the number of total work units required, and dividing the 50BTC proportionally amongst all accounts, including his dummy accounts. With enough blocks, he can snag quite a sum of money. Honest clients will see that their work units are being properly accounted, but they can never see that their effort is being diluted by the operator.

As a bonus, the operator can also appeal to people's sense of gratitude by asking for donations for running his "generous and free" service.

I'll wager that if I have thought of this, somebody else has already implemented it.

How can this be defeated? Comments? Suggestions?

Theoretically, it should give the exact same results.

Yes, we'd better get back on topic or gene might lodge a formal complaint

I think we have similar GPU power (just I have two separate cards generating 290Mhash each). Do you think it makes more sense to have them connected to one Bitcoin server or would you rather have them separated? I wonder does it make any difference; I had them connected to the same server for a while, but the results weren't what I expected and now I have them running on two separate machines, but for too short period of time to tell the difference as yet.

Sorry for balancing off the topic, we will get back to ripping off in a minute.

just generated a block of my own, felt like joining the pool for a little while again too