Quote from: znffal on January 09, 2018, 06:40:18 PM

Quote from: 616westwarmoth on January 09, 2018, 05:55:33 PM

Quote from: slovakia on January 09, 2018, 03:38:09 PM

EXPLAIN ALL MINERS THIS
in last 7 days i checked this
2000 miners on pool = results was 52 (24%)
3998 miners on pool = results is 42 (21%)
this is unbelievable

and pool fees 13% is record between coins Embarrassed for what you need 13%?

One: It seems likely the botnet is mining again. There are Monero (XMR) botnets out there and since this coin is CPU only, it's fair to believe botnets will target it too since a malicious botnet operator has nothing to lose by using up your CPU even when coin prices are low.

Two: You haven't looked to see what the hashrates of those new miners are. I personally pulled a couple beefy machines off and went solo with them (I still run pool on most) and I know two people that just started on low powered laptops. My hashrate per machine was about 10x what they are getting since their machines are weak. Given the amount of attention we're getting with the Masternodes, it's not that hard to imagine that a lot of casual users have come on board, while the high powered users have gone solo to avoid the pool fees.

Three: The reason for the high pool fees has been explained repeatedly. There was a security breach and a theft of the pool. The pool is not run out of the funds of the coin, it is run on the back of the Dev, so even if he made security mistakes that led to the problem, he should not bear the cost of the fix. Again, the pool is NOT the coin. In fact, if enough outside pools pop up, I'd highly recommend the Dev stop running the pool, but until that happens he's doing what is best for the coin.

Please excuse my ignorance. What is a botnet? How does it work? Why is it bad for us?

Thanks

A botnet is a group of computers that have been taken over (usually via malware) and are controlled by a malicious party. Some botnets number in the tens of thousands of computers, all controlled by one party to do their bidding. Primarily they are used to relay spam and for DDoS attacks, but the recent rise of crypto has seen them utilized to mine. In short, a computer gets infected and the owner doesn't realize it and joins a "party" of other infected computers to do the (by most standards) illegal activity of the controller.

Prior to MN, there was a botnet from China that was hitting this coin, I've not looked at the logs, but it may be the reason for the increase in difficulty as thousands of computers suddenly mining would spike the overall hash rate.