You are manipulating and you know it.
I'm not, I am making the most simplistic of statistical arguments against a logical fallacy. To say it technically you've adopted a model so complex that we cannot tell if you've overfit and can not reject the null hypothesis.
I can demonstrate this another way; lets take your proposed tests:
"having 4 nounces with differences less than 1.8%, 0.12% and 7.2% respectively of the range in this order."
"the block size, also points to the fact that it is the same miner who mined the blocks. 731 kB blocks are quite common as noted earlier by someone else, but it is not
very likely either to find them consecutively. " you haven't given a numerical threshold, so I'll just take that to be sizes within 10%
"The third piece of evidence is how close in time are these blocks."-- they're not actually unusually close, given hashrate changes, but I'll apply the softer limit of allow below 10 minutes.
"The fourth piece of evidence is the non-chronological timestamps " -- these are also fairly common through Bitcoin's history; but I'll go ahead and apply it too.
"The fifth piece of evidence is that the first block is mined by AntPool and the next 3 by anonymous." -- I can't mechanically apply this one, since it's just bc.i's opinion; but as you'll see leaving out a constraint only aids your argument now.
This is your test for a specific non-disclosed mining optimization. Since you won't disclose the optimization I cannot argue with that point, though it sounds implausibly over-complex.
Now we're going to ask the related question: "How much of the network is using the optimization identified by this test?";
There are _no_ there matches in the blockchain meeting that criteria other than the single range you've named. What should we then assume the proportion of hashrate using your optimization is? Approximately 0.
If it is (as for 99.99% of normal people), how would you go about proving that is out of normal? Won't you compute the probability of seeing this occurence?
But then it will be fallacious according to your comment since it is "after the fact"!!!
Nonsense!! Otherwise empirical knowledge won't exist!!
It's well established that normal people routinely engage in completely defective statistical reasoning. Statistics are unintuitive to people, virtually everyone finds qualitative reasoning more intuitive than quantitative reasoning.
An ideal way to reason about things is to first understand the process; form a hypothesis and from the hypothesis develop a model without looking at the data: "If vulnerability X is being exploited I will see blocks of with structures and probabilities X, if X is not exploited I will see blocks with structures and probabilities !X". You can then ask what the KL divergence of these two distributions are, and if it is very small then you will gain almost no confidence even with many observations; the question may be undecidable. If there is a separation between the probabilities then observations one can then apply a statical test to reject one alternative or another with a intentional level of chance of error.
An example of this would be "From the structure of SHA256, and the fact that the 80 byte input requires two runs of the compression function; someone could create slightly more efficient specialized hardware which hardcodes much of the message expansion and initial rounds from the second compression function run-- and scans by rolling the block version. If this optimization were at play I would expect to find that the block version would have very high entropy, perhaps 32 bits though anything more than a few bits would be suspicious; blocks exploiting this behavior would be expected to have uniform version numbers, rather than a constant in non-exploiting blocks" We could then apply this test to the blockchain, and because of the big gap between two cases we could decide pretty quickly if the test was indicating. This isn't a definitive test; there could be other reasons for the strange behavior, like miners trying to reduce their network bandwidth usage; we could try to make it more specific by adding a rule like "and we expect blocks with random versions to have nonces with far less entropy". ---- unfortunately, keeping the reasoning private prevents that kind of thoughtful analysis; all we can go on is how "weird" blocks are in the absence of a reasoned model, and thats not very useful since every block is "weird" by some definition. Its like if you look for the number 11 you'll find it everywhere.
Sometimes there are free parameters-- we want to ask a question like "does weight over some threshold cause heart attacks? and if so what is that threshold?", without knowing the parameter in advance. This had the danger of fitting the model to the data and telling us nothing at all (like my example of "predicting" the nonces that just happened); one tool used to address this problem with parametric models is cross validation: You split your observations up and use one subset to train the model and the other to test. If the effectiveness goes away during cross-validation the model is likely overfit. The protection isn't perfect because if you tweak the scheme based on the results you miss overfitting the "meta"-parameters.. This is effectively the test I applied above: You fit a model (a set of gap differences, block timstamps, inter-arrival times) and I excluded a single hit which you appear to have used to set your parameters from the testing set and found your model matched _no_ blocks at all.
Come on....what is not allowed is to pick an artificial or stupid complicate criteria. To look at nounce dispersion is natural.
What shouldn't be allowed is bad statistical reasoning, which can happen no matter how "natural" your model is, what primarily matters is how many degrees of freedom it has. What you are looking at there is _not_ dispersion; I tried to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you meant one of the standard metrics for dispersion (_range_) and you insisted on a complex polytope shape constraint; with probably something on the order of 34 bits of parameter space (three percentages to 0.1 precision without permutation), plus some more model freedom in that its looking at differences instead of absolute values.
If I instead use the standard deviation (another common dispersion metric) we that 0.1875% of 4-block sets (given uniform nonces) would have a standard deviation as low as your selected one; so again, something we'd see every few days.
or more precise description how miners work.
There is huge amounts of information; everything is open source except for the RTL and mask images of common hardware; though most follow not too far from prior FPGA designs in their overall structure.
Let me ask you something simple: Do you think these four blocks were mined by the same miner?
It appears unlikely, all four are miners that appear to constantly reuse a static address for their income, but they're each different. Walletexplorer does an overly aggressive 'taint' analysis and links many addresses to each, but they're disjoint. The lowest number appears to be antpool, the next appears to be AnxPro.com, the next is likely Polmine.pl (it frequently pays addresses connected with polmine.pl).
We can compute/estimate the probability of all the other "pieces of evidence" that are independent events with small probabilities. What is astonishing is the coincidence of all these facts.
There is nothing astonishing that when you pick criteria to fit the data, you find that it fits the data. There is also nothing astonishing that when a model created this way seems unlikely on a uniform basis that it will fail to generalize to anything but the data you fit it on.
I believe they prove that all 4 blocks were mined by the same miner (then these facts would not be independent and it makes more sense that they occur simultaneously).
Great; so you'll accept concrete proof that these blocks were mined by independent parties as a definitive proof that you were incorrect?
I have retracted and erased all claims. I wait for your gentleman's word of removing your negative rating.
(also, I understood that the forum "Trust system" is for trading (since the first thing you see is "Trade with extreme caution!"). I doesn't seem to be designed to be used for academic discrepancy.
I'm having a hard time figuring out what you mean by retracted and erased; your posts in this thread continue to claim
"It is clear that someone found a trick for fast mining. I kind of happen to know what might be.",
"It is premining at some extend. Won't disclose more for the moment." and so on. You continue to hold that you have "secret" knowledge which you will not disclose so that it can be discussed on its merits or lack thereof-- this entire thread is a great big advertisement for this claim and seems to have served you little other purpose; which the experienced professionals on this forum find to be non-credible and not supported by the evidence you've presented.
I haven't traded anything with you, and everybody with whom I have traded are 100% satisfied. I would appreciate that you don't use your trustworthy position in order to discredit me for disagreeing academically with you.
Moreover your comments "I suspect Valiron is either trying to scam someone out of paying for his "knowledge" or that he is attempting to manipulate the market price of Bitcoin; " are diffamatory and without ground. Also it is
ridiculous to pretend that I can manipulate the market by discussing anomalies in the block validations! I believe that the bitcoin market is a bit more robust...).
As I explained privately, your behavior so far is indistinguishable from a person who is willfully and fraudulently claiming to know of non-public mining optimizations in the hope of selling them to some greedy sucker who is unable to assess their merit except on the your misleading qualitative claim that the blocks look 'weird'. Protecting the forum's participants from being deceived themselves or from suffering the traffic from a flood of hopeful scammers demands that we call it out when we see the potential of it-- I say this not as the subfourm moderator or a developer of the Bitcoin system, but just as a community member... There is plenty of room for doubt; I'd say it's even more likely that you're just confused by the statistics of it, but the benefit of doubt can't be given freely, since those looking to exploit people will just sail through that opening. I offered you a simple mechanism which you can use to distinguish yourself-- share your complete theory with (ideally) the thread or privately with a respected member of the community; in doing so you gain the ability to refine it against the forge of experience, discover what (if any) parts are already known; and, in the possibility that there is something to be concerned about, gain the ability to protect Bitcoin from any potential harm if required. (I think you greatly underestimate the potential harm of privately held substantial mining optimizations-- beyond some threshold they would result in the complete centralization of the bitcoin system)
The forum trust is a metric of trust; I explained in the rating where the distrust comes from. Your claims here are not credible to any of the subject matter experts and as far as we can tell they're based on erroneous statistical reasoning, you're shielding your theories from criticism by hiding behind secrecy, forcing a debate around statistical minutia and how "weird" the blocks feel qualitatively, rather than the merits of your idea. Only a few weeks ago you were asking questions (using asics to hash files) that showed a profound lack of research and understanding of Bitcoin mining. I want to be sure someone considering trading with you over these ideas is aware that other community members do not currently consider your claims credible or likely to be well founded. Anyone is free to read the rating and come to their own conclusions.
I'm sorry that you find it heavy-handed. I would prefer if there were a way to make ratings which were more targeted or conditional. In consideration of this, I'll go and reduce it to neutral to avoid triggering the red flag on you. I am not seeking to cause you distress.