So it seems that the smart-miner group
developed their own ASICs, customized CGMiner and have a massive mining operation.
I don't do any mining, so some of these questions may be nonsense.
1. Based on what we know, the ASICs operate correctly right? After all, you don't turnaround problems with the ASICs in a deployed mining farm within a week.
2. Is it plausible that a CGMiner that has been customized to work with their smart-miner would correctly submit low difficulty shares yet fail to submit solutions? Not sure how miner s/w and h/w typically work, but in my naive view, it seems unlikely that the portion of the code that deals with distinguishing a solution and submitting it would actually need to be customised?
3. Xie insinuated that Eligius could have deleted / effaced their solutions from the block list, but did not outright claim that this was done. Surely the default mining software would have logged whenever a solution was found and submitted... so he should know right? (Unless these logs were lost due to their frequent re-imaging of the miner platform or something)