Hi!
I want to make clear that this is not meant to be a accusation of anybody, instead rather some questions that I hope somebody can prove as wrong.
Would it be possible for a big pool to secretly sideline some of the total hashing power to another pool or to solo mining?
A big pool could easily divert a very small percentage of its hashing power without anybody noticing. This "side"-hashing-power could be connected to another pool or simply to solo mining which would make it nearly undetectable.
As far as I understand this matter it could be theoretically possible as it is the pool deciding which piece of work the miners receive.
I was thinking about this theory lately because I did notice a significant difference between deepbit and BTCGuild over the past 5 weeks. I was pointing my miners to both pools, 50:50. However, with deepbit I almost always had a better BTC/24h ratio than with BTCGuild EVEN THOUGH deepbit subtracts a 3%-fee! In total it made a difference of around 1 btc which is not huge but very annoying nevertheless.
Of course there is a lot of luck in the game, but in a time span of 5 weeks this variance should be heavily diminished.
I want to make clear that this is not meant to be a accusation of anybody, instead rather some questions that I hope somebody can prove as wrong.
Would it be possible for a big pool to secretly sideline some of the total hashing power to another pool or to solo mining?
A big pool could easily divert a very small percentage of its hashing power without anybody noticing. This "side"-hashing-power could be connected to another pool or simply to solo mining which would make it nearly undetectable.
As far as I understand this matter it could be theoretically possible as it is the pool deciding which piece of work the miners receive.
I was thinking about this theory lately because I did notice a significant difference between deepbit and BTCGuild over the past 5 weeks. I was pointing my miners to both pools, 50:50. However, with deepbit I almost always had a better BTC/24h ratio than with BTCGuild EVEN THOUGH deepbit subtracts a 3%-fee! In total it made a difference of around 1 btc which is not huge but very annoying nevertheless.
Of course there is a lot of luck in the game, but in a time span of 5 weeks this variance should be heavily diminished.