Quote from: spectra on August 19, 2011, 08:35:15 PM

@joulesbeef, @teukon,

Quote from: teukon on August 19, 2011, 07:49:10 PM

A quick look at pident suggests that it is quite easy to tell when a certain pool has finished a block so I assume that the remaining problem is finding a pool which doesn't detect and ban pool-hopping behaviour. Again, I know little about the existing practical situation and am speaking purely in terms of theory and mathematics. I'm sure if I mined with a proportional pool I'd know more but I'm with simplecoin.us (which uses PPLNS) specifically so I don't have to worry about implementing pool hopping.

The "guess thing" you describe is a good idea when you have partial information.

All I meant to point out is that if one would like to pool hop with a big proportional pool and is having difficulty with the LP aspect then they can at least make some gains by using the information on the bitcoin network (if the pool is sufficiently large).

Check https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=33732.msg423533#msg423533

If that guy's math is right (there might be other variables to consider), teukon might not be too wrong by assuming deepbit most of the time. I think bitHopper is already doing better than that, though, and it is still improving... but I lack the numbers to back that up.

WRT using pident method... unless it improves, I would not use it alone. They report 36% accuracy in the score system! So, much better to flip a coin.

Yes, what he says seems solid to me. Combining this with the fact that you don't lose anything from guessing deepbit incorrectly but you do gain something from guessing deepbit correctly means you can make significant gains. Throw LP into the mix as the following post suggests and you have even higher gains. Indeed, you could almost certainly use LP knowledge from all of the proportional pools together to improve your gains even further.

Honestly, 36% accuracy doesn't seem so bad given how many different pools there are. I agree that if there were only two pools and every block came from one or the other then 36% is worse than flipping a coin. Perhaps pident already makes use of the LP information from all of the pools to make their best guess.

I dislike this race to the bottom on hiding information. It is reminiscent of copyright holders trying to prevent people from copying disks using all manner of trickery and obfuscation. Hopefully you guys will be successful in overcoming the defence put up by proportional pools and make some BTC in the process. Best of luck!