Topic: Vladimir's essential self-defence guide for Bitcoin Miners - page 5. (Read 13271 times)

http://abcpool.com/

that is a good one Vladi!  just take a swim instead of fiddeling with the rig. 


besides the link: good thing to point all that out loud and clear

that guide is a shameless promotion of your own pool, claiming that *MPPS pools are crap and should be avoided, how come ? ALL shares are paid * 0.00002768 BTC, for ALL miners!

If you know statistics well, what is your reason behind not using PPS? It has the lowest possible variance, is not dependent on pool size and can be easily calculated + verified.

Yes, with proportional payouts a bigger pool gives lower variance due to more "events" happening during the same time frame, but if you want to reduce variance, you would use pools with completely different payout methods anyways.

Also there were simulations done with distributing hash rate between several pools while hopping based on various criteria - bottom line is that it still is the best possible approach to just always jump to the pool with the lest shares, no matter how small (assuming all pool operators play/pay fair).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KoKWf6pLs8

Interesting thread.  Past performance doesn't indicate future "luck" and that is easily shown by the average number of shares taken (on average) to find the next block for a single user or pool.

Possibly the argument in favour of pool hoppers is that when they jump to small pools, their impact is proportionally higher.  Adding 1 Ghash to a 5000 Ghash pool has less impact than the other way around.  The flip side is that if 5000 Ghash hopped into a small 1 Ghash pool, then it would change the average finding rate (Poisson lambda) for that pool.  You also need to consider how long a hopper might stick with a "hopped" pool and that could be done on the basis of pool size over time.

Fundamentally, over time, any one returned share has the same probability of "finding" a block as any other.  Across all pools and all users, all the coins are distributed.  The ability to consistently get a higher payout is probably beyond the calculation ability of many, and if pool hopping makes them think it helps, then maybe they are not valuing their own time and effort properly.

Just for the record, I decided to join a larger pool and proportional payout rather than pay per share or a small pool/solo mining.  I know too much statistics to rely on luck 

what always gets me is when hoppers call 24/7 single pool miners "lazy"...  A "hard-working" thief is still a thief.

I have moved all but one out of my miners out known hopped pools.  The last will move out around the weekend. 

Since he is not claiming that #4 is false like other hoppers, I will just have to concede that this learned poster is too cunning to be understood.

OK then, how about reading the paragraph in full:



So:
1. I mention full time miners
2. Hoppers do not cost pool
3. pool operators can benefit
4. Full time miners make less than hoppers

Since I mention that full time miners lose out just after the part where I said the pool can benefit I don't think there's any confusion there.

Just admit you didn't read the post and we can kiss and make up.

Im curious how that would work? Did you mean proxy some shares TO bigger pools?   Wouldnt you still need to charge a premium on top of whatever you are making from the bigger pool per share?   Is this ethical?

You don't have to generate all getworks yourself, so you could just proxy some shares from bigger pools in the beginning to not run out of funds. Also Bitcoins are quite cheap atm. - getting 100 of them to pay for nearly 4 million shares is not that expensive... shutting down because of running out of funds leaves me asking why someone starts a pure PPS pool in the first place, where they know they might have to have an initial bank roll to cover everything until the first block is found etc.

I think that many PPS pools will come up as "meta" pools (maybe even doing pool hopping in the background) and charging for example a 2% fee (VERY low for pure PPS) but mining at 0% PPLNS/SMPPS/... pools to build up funds for a real PPS endeavour in the future. For this you just need a handful of coins to battle the pooled pools variance (which is usually not as huge as block finind variance on your own) and nearly no infrastructure. On the other hand as soon as one of the other pools scams the metapool owner, it's likely that he'll either have to shut down or otherwise go out of business, so it's important that he'll get his funds quickly and as often as possible from the other pools.

You say "full-time miners have to remember" - that shows we are discussing the interests of full-time miners, not the pool operator, so "pool" defines "miners pooling their resources". This thread's topic also shows we are discussing benefits to bitcoin miners and their concerns; this is not a guide for pool ops to maximize their profits by getting more block solves and fees by green-lighting hopping. The reply sounds revisionist.

Marking valid shares as stale or bad accounting, or not reporting a block find to pool members, are not the the likeliest attack vectors of an unscrupulous pool op. The least transparent (although it will still show over time as lowered luck) is for the pool op to add nonexistant mining shares into the pool rounds, getting paid for mining work not done.

you've kind of just pointed one of the more insidious potential effect of hopping.  For many small pools switching to PPS is simply not an option due the much higher variance risk they have to bear.  Only last week we saw a small pool shutdown for just that reason.  The endgame is that small pools will gradually lose 24/7 miners to pool large enough to handle PPS.  Leaving them with only hoppers... When they have no 24/7 miners left to leech off the hoppers won't have any advantage and will move onto the next pool.

It's currently very hard for small pools to break in a get a reasonable market share but continue to above scenario to it's logical conclusion and you won't have any more small pools.  Competition and innovation will be seriously damaged.

If this happens, the pool can still switch and maybe win these miners back.

What I meant by fixed amounts was that currently mining is on operator side in any case a game of luck, there's no "PPS" for pools themselves. If this variance is too high for pool operators to bear, this might lead to problems. If you however design a pool that for example only pays out (automatically) once a week, you can then deduct fixed fees transparently from everything mined during that week and distribute the rest. Depending on how hight your expenses + pool luck are, this might shift the effective percentage taken a bit, but allows for more sustainable planning and expansion and might also lead to less accusations of greed/cheating (there is for example NO way to tell for sure if [Tycho] is manipulating stats/mining every 1000th block for himself/doing other evil things as this would all just go down in noise - again, I'm NOT saying he is doing any of these things, just using him as an example). With fixed fees you could be sure that the pool operator always gets what he needs - not more, not less. With just a fixed percentage it's a bit tricky: Is 1% enough? Would 0.95% also be enough? What about 0.94321%? What about the time the Block reward halves? Double the percentage?

Even if it doesn't cost the pool directly it will cost indirectly as their 24/7 miners wise up and leave for a hop-proof pool.

Please read the part i bolded. Actually, perhaps you should just read things properly the first time. You do have a tendency tend to fly off the handle a bit without reading things properly, deepceleron.

Read it again carefully... i think he really does mean to say they dont cost the POOL any money.  They do however cost the miners IN the pool money.

Yes, they do cost non-intelligent miners money - but not the pool itself! The pool actually gains, if it swings from occassionally 260GH/s to 60 GH/s sustained vs. only 60 GH/s all the time.

As pool operators charge fees based on income percentages (instead of just fixed fees, like 5 BTC or 50 USD in BTC or whatever per week) they do earn more, the more hash rate they have. Pool hoppers provide hash rate, so they increase the income of operators.


@Vlad:
Doing statistical analysis is also only useful to a certain degree, since a pool operator can do that as well and just configure his share stealing to be within error rates. Also anything displayed on a website can be faked, and if a pool launders it's newly found blocks before paying them out to it's miners, there's nearly no way for users to find out which pool has found which block for sure.

Bottom line is that you have to trust your pool operator. A lot. There are a lot more ways to cheat your users as pool operator and if you do it carefully, it's also maybe detectable, but not provable (if you stay within certain limits). It is for example possible to just mark shares as "stale" at will for the operator and there's no way to dispute this for miners.

Watch your operator(s) closely, pay them reasonable fees (ideally fixed per week/month, NOT percentages of found blocks, as it might make them greedy/desperate) and try to invent/improve new things, like P2Ppool did.

This is untrue. This is like those disseminating anti-global warming or anti-evolution information, there is little doubt in the scientific community, but it serves to create a perception that there is even another side besides the one based on fact-finding.

I will post pretty pictures for those who need it. These were done by forum user (and poclbm-autohop creator) Aexoden (not me, conspiracy theorists), who has run simulations here of different payout systems for full-time miners, on a 200ghash pool vs. a 200ghash pool + 100ghash of hoppers. Blue line is what you make.





(edit: I do see something I don't like in these graphs, rounds longer than 1/2 difficulty should be shorter by a .14 difficulty factor, since we assume the first dif*.43 of a round had 50% more hashrate. If the X coordinate is time (not shares), that should result in a subtle skew to the left. Perhaps I will do my own Mathematica simulation, since I know how to generate an accurate "hashes before blockfind" distribution, but then again I don't care that much..)


(edit again: I guess the expected skew is there, in the "with pool hoppers" example, the pool has solved two more blocks by the end.)

Why, I even asked Google  :

Some pools are considering a hoppers fee and redistributing the whole fee to their full time miners. With full disclosure, and extra coins every round, full time miners at these pools might start wondering where the money is coming from.

Another point is that pools often stay prop because their members demand it. Maybe your thread might reverse the trend.

Good call. Full time miners have to remember that hoppers do not cost the pool any money (unless the hoppers come down on an unprepared  pool like a very small ddos attack). In fact pool ops can benefit from the increased hashrate at the start of a round by using that hashrate for advertising.

Full time miners do however make proportionally less than hoppers and with hash rate decreasing once hoppers leave, they get increased variance too.