Quote from: philipma1957 on April 04, 2019, 05:04:12 PM

So basically

1)bitmain had ~~and still has~~ the ability to cheat on hashnest. edit bitmain may not own hashnest anymore
2)bitmain had and still has the ability to cheat on bitdeer.
3)bitmain had the ability to use its covert asicboost.
4)bitmain and others had the ability to manipulate the tx fees as per this thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2634505.0

and not only did that ability exist I had concrete evidence that was being done by various pools back in 2017

Less conspiracy theories and more provable facts please.
Like your withholding conspiracy theory, trying to play up some conspiracy theory you have without providing any actual proof.

The S9 chips have had Overt AB in them, that has recently (Nov) been activated by Bitmain's firmware upgrade.
However, you would have seen MANY of these "Block Version" blocks with this since 2016 if Bitmain was using the Overt AB they have in the chips.
So clearly they didn't do that, since they have always been a large % of the Bitcoin network, so it would be blatantly obvious.

So Bitmain DID release the firmware to everyone that uses Overt AB at the same time as they started using it themselves.

...and see below ...

Quote from: gmaxwell on April 04, 2019, 07:44:58 AM

They claim this, but the claim seems kind of absurd. The whole point of covert is that it's cover, it's nearly impossible to detect.

Consider though: at great expense they developed an significant performance optimization and baked it into their chips, huge numbers of which they ran themselves ... and then kept it secret but ... just didn't use it? Why? because they like giving money away to the power company?

There is evidence that bitmain was asicboosting: among other things (Edit: e.g. as frodo mentions, the huge number of empty blocks, which have more or less magically gone away), they mined a small number of blocks that were invalid because transactions were out of dependency order. This would be a pretty difficult mistake to make-- unless you were grinding blocks by swapping around transaction order. It's just not conclusive proof, unfortunately short of some massive internal document leak conclusive proof is likely impossible.

[Edit: The empty block part is really strong because unlike any other case you can compute the collisions for the empty blocks arbitrarily far in advance, so even if takes you tens of seconds to find one on the FPGA you can keep mining until one is found.]

Ignoring the rest of the conspiracy theories after the quote above ...

Empty blocks are only seen shortly after a block change.
You can thank your favourite pal LukeJr for that idea - he was the first to do it due to high orphan rates, due to running a crappy pool, and then pools like F2Pool and Bitmain copied him and expanded on it to do SPV mining (which is how F2Pool and AntPool together lost a total of 6 blocks in 2013)

Due to others (and my) 'blow up' of the empty block issue, they now send out more work soon after the block change to minise the number of empty blocks.
Almost ALL the large pools STILL produce empty blocks (slush included)
That hasn't changed, but only the NUMBER of those empty blocks on ALL those pools has reduced.

Your theory pretty much is saying that Bitmain runs every large pool Tongue

Edit: I should add, in case it's not obvious, if Bitmain decided to use Covert AB only 5% of the time - the first work sent out after a block change - then updated to a full block in the next work - that would be more unlikely than any other theory. Since only finding empty blocks shortly after a block change directly implies that Covert AB would only be used 5% of the mining time ... so rather pointless.

Quote from: gmaxwell on April 04, 2019, 09:40:19 AM

Yes, I'm referring to later, not so kind of you to sit quietly amid all those claims that I was lying... when you could have instead happily bragged that you knew all along.

Oh well! I forgive you.

I only post/read here, I don't have a reddit account.
The only time I end up on reddit is searching about anime and the rare link from here in something I read

Edit: fun

I just read that link. CW is a retard who cleary was never Satoshi - Satoshi's posts are so obviously different to CW that is not even possible.
You (and Gavin), on the other hand, post more like Satoshi than anyone else who was around early Tongue