Quote from: kano on July 19, 2016, 06:13:07 PM

Quote from: KyrosKrane on July 19, 2016, 04:59:54 PM

Quote from: kano on July 19, 2016, 04:23:27 PM

The only way around this would be to try to force an orphan race and hope we got a double confirm.
But purposefully creating an orphan race after a block change is frowned upon and we don't do that ... though I've no idea if other pools do, or not.

I was thinking about that when I saw the previous comment. There's got to be some value in trying to build on your own (orphaned) block. It would take someone with far more math and game theory experience than me, though, to work out the correct probabilities and returns. I'm sure someone has already done that, though, privately if not publicly -- and I would be very surprised if the "corporate" pools didn't have some sort of policy in place about that, so as to maximize their return.

At 45PH it's about a one in 34 chance of us confirming our own block.
Since how rare it is that we'd get a stale block, that makes it pretty much pointless anyway.
e.g. if it was about 1 in 400 (well it's probably less likely even than that) that's 1 in 400 * 35 = 1 in 14,000 so yeah very pointless.

KyrosKrane, it isn't that complicated, you got the important parts. The main thing is if you could get the next block, your reward would be double (as you would be getting 2 blocks by confirming your first, rather than only getting the second block). Basically, you have about a 10 minute shot at double the reward when this happens (a 2 block reward rather than the normal 1 block reward).

Yeah, it is 1 in 14,000 for any block the pool finds (I assume Kano is saying this happens every 400 blocks or so at the pool), so the pool has only had about a 10% chance of doing this so far being at block 1191. Not great odds and it isn't a realistic thing that changes rewards at the pool.

I could see how it is not looked at in a good light. However, there is normally nothing to be gained by working on a block the network isn't working on, so I think in general people would not do this (there is no point in working on a old block if you have not already solved it, it is in your interest to move on). However, if you have solved a block that might become a stale or an orphan, it is probably to your advantage to try confirming that block, it basically doubles your reward if you find the next block. Overall, built into the bitcoin protocol is a pretty good system of rewards that gets people to behave how they should. That is until you get to 51%, then you can get all of the blocks with only 51% of the speed (by working on and confirming only your blocks, eventually you would have the longest chain and would orphan all other blocks), undo confirmed spends, etc.