[solved] What stops miners from withholding winning shares from the pool?

ranochigo

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Quote from: ir.hn on January 02, 2022, 07:46:26 PM

As far as I can tell, if a pool could test your miner by messing with transactions or other block data that would quickly hash to a "winning" nonce then I'm sure the bad miner could be made to notice such manipulated blocks (unless I'm missing something which seems to happen a lot lol). Perhaps by connecting to his own node to verify what the pool is sending him.

You probably won't notice, if your own pool can just send the work template for another miner. Of course, this isn't accurate by any means and would probably not be that ideal given how stratum and the mining software differs.

It would be far more likely for the assumptions to be made on the likelihood of a block being found given X shares.

ir.hn

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Consensus is Constitution

Quote from: ranochigo on January 02, 2022, 07:37:25 PM

You would probably be subjected to the pool 'testing' your miner by sending parameters that would result in a block and you'll still be incurring costs in the midst of it.

As far as I can tell, if a pool could test your miner by messing with transactions or other block data that would quickly hash to a "winning" nonce then I'm sure the bad miner could be made to notice such manipulated blocks (unless I'm missing something which seems to happen a lot lol). Perhaps by connecting to his own node to verify what the pool is sending him.

ranochigo

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Block withholding attacks has happened before. Eligius had an attacker that was witholding several blocks in the past and was discovered and the account was locked. It worked for awhile but it really doesn't make that much sense to attempt this on a pool. You would probably be subjected to the pool 'testing' your miner by sending parameters that would result in a block and you'll still be incurring costs in the midst of it.

PPS, FPPS and other schemes tends to pay lesser than PPLNS in certain cases so that is also a mitigating factor.

BitMaxz

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Block halving is coming.

Not all reward types or payment methods will not pay if they didn't find the blocks PPS+ and FPPS will pay you even the pool didn't find a block.

Unlike PPLNS you should read this link below it explain more about all of those reward types.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_pool

ir.hn

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Consensus is Constitution

So you get paid by a mining pool for meeting lesser difficulty shares, less leading zeroes are needed to win a share at a mining pool and earn income. So what is stopping miners from sharing loosing shares with the mining pool and keeping winning shares to themselves and claim the whole block reward? I have to be missing something right?

EDIT: looks like the block the pool was having miners mine on contains the coinbase to pay the pool. So you cannot keep a winning block for yourself. However you could just withhold the winning entirely, and that would be an attack on a pool to reduce the pools "luck". You would still get paid in a "Pay per share" type of pool arrangement. PPLNS https://coinguides.org/pps-vs-pplns/ will basically prevent the attack because if the pool doesn't win a block, you don't get paid.

More info: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1338/how-is-block-solution-withholding-a-threat-to-mining-pools

Topic: [solved] What stops miners from withholding winning shares from the pool? (Read 132 times)