Quote from: organofcorti on March 05, 2017, 12:21:56 PM

Quote from: agentcash on March 05, 2017, 12:42:11 AM

Quote from: philipma1957 on March 05, 2017, 12:27:35 AM

if they toss back to back that is 1 in 10000 chance my guess is the pool has

bad code
bad server
bad internet
or bad gear mining on it.

Or the pool owner decided to snag a block reward for themselves. I hazily recall a pool getting caught out for the statistical improbability of their never finding extremely lucky blocks back around 2012. Turned out the owners were taking all the blocks the pool found below a certain share threshold.

Do you remember which pool?

I don't remember the name, but I think its website had a brownish color scheme. This was more likely late 2011, back when the common pool payout method was proportional (a few had PPS) and pool hopping was a thing. At the tail end of the GPU era with the first BFL FPGAs trickling out.

A few months before, someone (Meni?) had posted proof that hopping was much more profitable and so we were torturing the pools with essentially a miner DDoS right after they found a block to try and get a few shares in any short blocks. It was one of the 8-12 pools I would hop. There were grumblings about how this specific pool never seemed to have really short blocks, and someone looked at the stats to see that indeed there seemed to be a cutoff.

People kept hopping it for a few months and eventually the pool got hacked with it's source leaked showing they would set the payout address to their own on a block change and update it to the pools after some percentage of difficulty had been hashed.

Now this was all years ago and things were changing so fast back then that I'm sure some of the few details I remember are mashed up with other things or out of order. I'm almost certain it was the pool with the brown color scheme, there was another questionable pool that was white with lots of text and charts that was also shady, but lasted much longer.