Post
Topic
Board Mining
Re: Pool hopping... ethical or not?
by
jgraham
on 22/08/2011, 14:34:25 UTC
So as is often your problem you are equivocating. Even if every agreement included the "implied covenant of good faith" that does not necessitate your ideas about "fairness" ie. "no mine hopping".  

So until you come up with an argument to support that - your point is dead.
I made that argument about 10 places in this very thread. But just in case you somehow missed them all, I'll repeat some of them for you:

"A pool hopper does benefit at the expense of other miners."

"That is nothing like a mining pool where many miners believe their interests are aligned."

"If you left the pool because you want to shift a disproportionate share of the work to the other miners, only to re-enter it when you claim a disproportionate share of the profit, that's bad faith. That's abusing the system to get a share greater than your fair share at the expense of your fellow miners."

"Pool hoppers see it as a competition to get the most from the cake. Other miners believe that it's a cooperative. That's the problem. If everyone understands it's a competition, that's fine. But otherwise, you expect that the guys on the same team as you are playing for the team, not themselves."

"Entering a profit-making cooperative with others when times are good, taking a disproportionate share of the profit earned by the work of others, only to desert the cooperative as soon as hard work is necessary to make more profit, with the intent of re-joining the cooperative as soon as the hard work is done in time to get another disproportionate share of the profit is an inherently unethical practice."
Firstly, only one of those things actually qualifies as an argument and that one doesn't appear to be the argument I asked for.  So you can understand why I didn't mention them.  Grin

Next I suspect you're missing the point a bit here so.  Do you mind clarifying if you are saying that these things you are claiming above are derived from the legal understanding of the "implied covenant of good faith" or are they implied through some other means?

If the former then you need to show how these necessitate not a breach of YOUR personal idea of "good faith" but rather how it undermines a particular element expressed in the contract - which is what the ICoGF - as weak as it is legally - protects.   As far as the pools I've been involved with there isn't much in the way of a contract.   Without such an agreement and assuming you are arguing that "unless specified as acceptable pool hoping is always unethical" then it would seem reasonable that the broadest sense of "mining" would prevail here: "I will give you computing time on my machine for some period in exchange for some share of what the pool generates in the same time period as derived by their payback algorithm".   Can you explain, specifically which relationship explicitly stated in that definition is undermined by pool hopping.

If the later then your point is probably dead but if you want to pursue it I'd start with your third quoted statement the other three are garbage (in terms of a logical argument).