Topic: Wonder who this solominer is? 88.6.216.9 - page 29. (Read 60498 times)

Does that list strike anyone as odd? Unless it is 0.5% and it's already been sorted to show only the most powerful machines, there is way too much powerful hardware there. There's 383 machines listed, if that 0.5% it implies he controls 76 thousand PCs. If you had a real random botnet, finding 1000 machines with that kind of horsepower would probably require infecting 1,000,000. You'd think he could find something more profitable and less likely to be detected to do with his botnet than mining.

IM not entirely an idiot, Im talking about the global network hashrate, thats stable or slightly down,  and deepbits luck based on its known hashrate is down too.  Two different things. Deepbit is big, but its not the entire network yet. If 1+ TH comes out of the blue from a botnet or some asic provider, you could reasonably expect a decrease blocks time, at least until the next difficulty adjustment. Ive not seen anything like that. SIPA is showing a flat or downward trend over the time this mystery miner has been producing his blocks. So either its just a coincidence or this is not new, but existing hashing power thats being redirected or the blocks somehow "stolen".

That wouldn't show up as bad luck.  That would simply show up as all major pools becoming x% less popular.  Deepbit for example isn't showing a decline in the rate of shares/sec blocks are simply taking longer.  The simplest explanation is just variance but even if it was some unknown form of attack it has to be more complex than just redirecting miners.

I'll bet the simple explanation is that he has compromised some or many machines that used to be mining already, but for other pools, and forced them to mine for him. Hopefully it isn't a miner software vulnerability.

Watching. Let me know when to get my tinfoil hat out and my IP traveling Switch hopping Death Ray!

People claiming hashrate is down AND their is bad luck like that is some coincidence are missing something ...

there is no way to know hashrate we only know block completion time.  Bad luck = longer blocks = lower estimated hashrate.

Some guy at Hetzner ?

Edit: just reminded me at this film where Edward Norton plays this retarded cleaner.

More food for tinfoil hatters.

Yesterday a guy called "sudo" showed up in bitminters IRC channel, bragging about his botnet and insinuated to be the mystery miner. Transcript below, he hadnt much to say, except for the only evidence he presented, a list of computer names, supposedly only a fraction of what he controls.

Clearly, he could just be a pretender; if he really ran a botnet like that, there is absolutely zero reason for him to come and brag about it.  but why would someone, even a pretender,  come to bitminter channel (and only bitminter) of all places to brag about his botnet, while having absolutely nothing to say about it?  Its the only channel I was in. His name being sudo (ie root), connected through a German node.

Could of course all be coincidence, but let me suggest it might also be a desperate attempt to convince me that MM is a botnet after all, and not some clever ploy to steal blocks from deepbit (and possibly bitminter, remember, same host, same unbelievable bad luck):



Meanwhile, overall network hashrate is still slightly down, deepbit is still at +40% average block length (bitminter possibly even worse, havent calculated) and MM is still mining one block after the other. If this keeps up for a few more days, I no longer believe in coincidence.

These guys just turned on a new IP. Either they just got real lucky in finding four of the last 10 blocks, or they have some significant horsepower. The block finding rate for blocks 321-331 was only 68% of difficulty. There is definitely weirdness afoot.


188.127.227.12

171328    2012-03-16 03:53:16    00000000000005c28ce323c9b359a18cd0f84745eb410db2f58359cb09632fff

85.214.124.168

171327    2012-03-16 03:24:26    0000000000000897f9422c236e74294a0c66d5bea681e4caae368e72917bdb74
171325    2012-03-16 02:52:40    000000000000051c3f0ba28aaf5f09ea044e52df538ee023ca8d66d351168f6b
171319    2012-03-16 01:21:22    00000000000000858fc8879e7928912874b4eb48650b8799d85a5793743fb776

171275    2012-03-15 17:27:23    00000000000003a681f718619ddc7e04e0a8a4c1cf8cb0af670c7a663f2629b5
171266    2012-03-15 15:13:53    0000000000000251a8801909669d34b99c230cdfc4f8dd7e438778bc9cfd8b24
171264    2012-03-15 14:57:30    0000000000000a47e75adb826c4522e67c48163a6e72483bedd4585c6d7a185d
171262    2012-03-15 14:26:29    00000000000009231d79ce3c6887a0711ecb299cde90ffd38dac0bec65f77600
171254    2012-03-15 13:08:14    00000000000007bd4819d1cfa789228de1172671b0ba42185d7ba64b57a45262

9 blocks - vs. 18 blocks found by deepbit in the same time, and deepbit's average round time was 28% longer than difficulty.

Well, in theory nothing is impossible.

But in practice it should be extremely difficult, requiring access to many servers and correcting different DB records. Especially considering that during those days I was working hard updating my mining nodes, relayers, monitoring nodes and so on - the software versions and log modes were different all the time.

I would rather expect the most simple explanation :)

But what if. Assume MM has root access to your server. Could you think of a way that would allow him to build blocks with shares from your miners, without causing anything weird in your logs?

I 'm checking my logs carefully, but don't see anything except for bad luck (and I have very good logs).
Shares are accepted, blocks are generated and approved by the network as they should.

Funny thing is that MM used my relays for publishing her blocks and I was afraid that people will look at the pie chart and start accusing me of approaching 51% again :)

Yeah by itself its entirely plausible its just bad luck and I wouldnt read anything in to it, if it werent coinciding with this mystery miner.  Even so Im not exactly convinced they are related, but its an intriguing (im?)possibility.

BTC Guild luck has been pretty abysmal the last two days, but I'd still not call it fishy.  Every pool has good days and bad days, we've just happened to have a few pools get their bad luck at the same time.

Slush is 3x smaller. Anyway, obviously -45% can (and  therefore, eventually will) happen, its not a statistical impossibility, its just seems to coincide with this mystery miner appearing. Add to that bitminter is seeing similar bad luck on the same host, and it begins to smell fishy.

Slush luck: 78%, 112%, 101%
1day, 7day, 30day
but it's been a really bouncy couple days.

Miners would notice they are not seeing as many shares on their stat page as they see in their miner. Within hours someone would raise hell. Now its just blamed on luck.

Mind you, it could very well be bad luck and coincidence, but deepbit 24hr luck is now down by almost 40% 45% now. Is that a record? Bitminter hasnt found a lucky block in ages. And mystery miner doesnt seem to have any effect on global hashrate. I dont claim to know how it would or could work, but it looks suspicious to me.

Relax, man.

What we are witnessing now are market forces leaning towards not giving a flying one about transactions and just reaping the rewards of mining, because fees are typically so low right now.

Block rewards are going down soonish and transaction numbers are nowhere enough now to have a negligible fee per transaction. This is the simple reality.

We will find out the hard way. This particular miner is already setting a significant trend in the network.

oh ffs, any forced TX fee will be top the detriment of BTC. Let the market decide!
Market forces are incredibly strong, you guys are not giving it enoug credit.

Forced fee of 0.01BTC today would be 5$ cents, ok that's not much for MOST of us, but how about africans? Indians? In Africa 36.2% of people live with under 1$ a day! GDP per capita is just 1200$ while in US it is 48147$, so that 0.01BTC works about 40 times higher for africans relative to their income, now would you pay 2$ per transaction? (Adjusted by living standards would probably be more like 5$)
Whoops, you just closed down 922 million people market from BTC by introducing TX fees! :O

TX fees will happen, no matter what, when block rewards go down, and more people see value in BTC. Bitcoin is still very small and niche. How many Bitcoin users are there currently? Not that many!
Market cap for all BTC too is very low still.

People will start paying TX fees overtime, introducing now any rules to stop 0 tx blocks, forced TX fees etc. would hinder bitcoin, maybe even to the point it never becomes widely adopted *oops*

The protocol is not broken, there is nothing to fix, 0 TX blocks are not an exploit or an attack.
Want TX Fees? By all means increase the required TX for Your blocks.

Eventually ppl will start including more TX fees. Last 24hrs was 6730 transactions which is extremely low when thinking globally. Now when we start reaching 100k transactions a day, which is still very low, if 0.1% includes a TX fee of 0.01, that is 1BTC a day - still very small by any standard. When we are close to having all 21million BTC in circulation, and active userbase of 100million, we are talking about something like 50million+ transactions a month. At this time even if just 25% miners adopt a minimum of 0.001BTC fee, people will be incentivized to gve TX fees, say 2% choose to include them at the minimum level that is 1000BTC a month already, still for smaller user base than PP has!

Average PP account has about 40$ on it, so at this point BTC has to be *at least* 19.04$ each (see my post in economics), but as BTC people tend to hoard them as investment etc. and no sane person keeps much money in PP, we can safely quadruple this to 160$, meaning each BTC is atleast 80$ worth -> 80k $ worth of TX fees a month with still very small adoption!
And to be honest, i see more like people having BIG balances as their savings etc. So we could probably increase that still *10 fold*.

If Bitcoin becomes a true success, to which there is currently no objections, we are going to see more like an user base of *2 billion*.
With same ratios of 2 transaction every other day per active user average, with 2% paying TX fees of 0.001BTC, that all of sudden becomes: 20 000BTC or 3 200 000$ a month in TX fees. More than 100k $ a day, more than 4k $ an hour, something like 700$ per block!

And you want to be greedy now, and slow that day from happening? (Greedyness is one of the biggest reasons new and inexperienced companies fail, hell, even i have fallen to that bear trap with a very popular site making hundreds of revenue daily!)

FYI, transaction fees has to be voluntary and arbitrary, so we can allow people a way to transfer cheaply very low quantities also (there is currently some forced fee for very tiny transactions tho, isn't it there?) for micropayments etc. other things which cannot be done with today's money gateways.

Think about a situation where BTC replaces Paypal ... And that is just the beginning!
TX Fees will happen, people will see value in that, especially if the benefits of including TX fees are heavily advertised by miners: Be included faster, support the strength of the cluster etc.

That is correct.  The reward address is a part of the block thus a part of the merkle root.  The hash which solves the block only solves that EXACT BLOCK with every single transaction including the coinbase transaction which pays the pool/miner(s).