Topic: Wonder who this solominer is? 88.6.216.9 - page 12. (Read 60498 times)

First a service is provided.  It adds nearly 15% hashing power to the network.  The network is harder to attack at 11.5 TH/s vs 10.0 TH/s.


Those two statements are mutually exclusive. 

How do you know the "mystery" miner isn't doing that.  It just happens to be his fee threshold is 100 BTC.

More realisticly say I wanted to only include tx which have a fee of 0.01 BTC or more.  Most blocks would have no tx.  How do you reconcile the statements a miner should be able to set fee BUT not include empty blocks?  What if no tx match the desired fee?

Where all of your nonsense breaks down is that there is no possible fee that would get this guy to include your transaction because he isn't even looking at transactions.

I'd be willing to bet $100 of my own real money that this is a botnet.  The evidence so far points seriously towards a botnet that operates by distributing only the bare minimum of information (the previous block's hash) to the nodes, which then generate a valid block themselves and try hashes.  If anyone can provide convincing proof that this is something else, I will mail the first person to do so a check or send them the equivalent in BTC.

The difference between this miner and other miners, is that this miner is a parasite.  It's not providing any services, but reaps the rewards.  Whereas other miners are more like a symbiosis, they give and get.  It's mutually beneficial.

Pools like DeepBit are in symbiosis with miners, if DeepBit stopped giving rewards, how long do you think it would last?

I agree that miners should be able to set tx fees, but they should be able to mine only containing tx that match their fees, but no empty blocks.

Yes.  If someone is committing a crime to get an advantage over me I do. It is quite different then being beaten by an ASIC that someone spent $500k on.

this is how I understand everything I have read. This really does lead to competition in the market.

You pay a fee. 
If the fee is high enough then a miner includes the tx.
You have no right to have a tx in a block.

Assume the botnet operator would pay the owners of his bots. Would you, as a miner, still feel like you are being stolen from?
As deepbit said, its only the owners of the machines that are getting robbed. For miners it would make no difference if the botnet operator  rather than stealing computer resources, instead robbed a bank and bought a warehouse full of FPGAs with his loot. Or he actually bought it from his saving account. Makes no difference - except for the bank.

Hashes are supposed to be less than specific value defined by current difficulty.

1) are not hashes supposed to include transactions? If they don't, I see a kind of faking work.
For the rest, I stay with my case.
Legit miners are those who invest to produce useful proper output. The others are not.

1) They are providing valid hashes, so their blocks are legit. Not even a bit less legit than anyone else.
2) They aren't ignoring other blocks so they help securing the blockchain.
3) You don't know if it's a botnet or any other mining method like ASIC/GPU farm. And even if it's a botnet, it's still not stealing anything from miners.

May be you think that GPU owners steal BTCs from CPU miners ? Or may be people with stolen/cheap power are stealing BTC from US/California miners ?

Correct.  If it was a botnet, the computer access and power are being stolen from those owners.  If it is a ASIC, nothing is being stolen at all. 

A lot was stolen from miners in 2 ways:
1) seizing a big percentage of the BTC created (which otherwise would have be gone to legit miners)
2) Increasing the difficulty, so reducing the rate at which legit miners gain

Now can you see the light?

Nothing was stolen from legit miners.

It would be interesting to see what is he doing with the BTC stolen from legit miners.
Is he selling already?

Well, how about stealing them? seriously, If I'm a huge $XXbillion business I can buy coins all day and then sell them all off at a huge loss, and not care financially. A $41M loss to JP Morgan is a bad trade on a bad day. Not really a big loss. What do they care how they acquire the coins? All they have to do is make sure the acquisition doesn't drive the price higher than they could drop it.

To do it, I certainly don't have to be obvious as I start my plan, only at the crucial execution in the market (when I dump) - penny stocks have been famous in the US for this type of manipulation.


Right! The free market at work.

Here's another way to think about this:

Satoshi was quite clear that it was reasonable for each miner to set a fee threshold for transactions to be included in their blocks, and that a market would develop amongst miners.

So mystery miner's actions are no different from a miner who sets a fee threshold of 21 million bitcoins to include a transaction in the mined block.

And how exactly would you go about acquiring the necessary sizeable pile of coins?

Is it possible for that kind of patch to include the option of mining your own fake high fee transactions that you don't broadcast to the network? (meltmining)

If the answer is yes add me to the bounty (I'm poor, but half of my coins will go there)

It already does.  Miners are free to choose which transactions to include.  To date most pools & miners simply include all valid transactions.  The subsidy is very high and that is the default option of bitcoind.

All that is necessary is for the client to be aware of the fee policy of all/most miners and the current pending transactions and it could provide a recommended fee (include 0.01 for for 95% chance of inclusion in next 3 blocks, include a 0.0005 fet for 95% chance of inclusion in next 18 blocks).

Of course it is a chicken & egg scenario.  If all miners include all tx (fee or not) then there is no real reason for the client to be upgraded. If users have no way of knowing what fee pools/miners require then there is no reason for pools to exclude tx with low fee.

Personally I think two simple thing can happen to get the ball rolling.  1 some % of miners simply agree to not include tx w/ fee below X BTC.  If enough do then there will be a catalyst for making the client "network aware".  The second event is simply the subsidy cut.  If not this one (50->25 then certainly the next one 25->12.5).  As subsidies decline the free ride miners have been granting will come to an end.

I am thinking of offering a bounty for a patch to bitcoind which allow for a command line argument (--min-fee x) which excludes work without sufficient fee from getworks.  That would allow even p2pool users to set a fee policy.


Which is why I think a minimum fee other than 1 satoshi will be necessary but we have plenty of time to think about it.

Don't spoil the fun please.