Quote from: TheJuice on June 16, 2014, 11:50:14 PM

Quote from: organofcorti on June 16, 2014, 11:06:55 PM

Quote from: eleuthria on June 16, 2014, 01:46:03 AM

Quote from: organofcorti on June 15, 2014, 11:46:04 PM

Also, it should be noted that the most recent example of this attack was apparently not an attack, rather it was probably a software problem - although this should have already been detected during testing on the testnet, so I'm not sure how "unknown" it could have been.

The problem was their software discarding shares that matched 2^32-1 difficulty or better. Anything UNDER that, they worked fine. So testnet would not have detected anything wrong.

Ah, of course, I see your point.

However, it does make me think of something else - they were at 2Phps, weren't they? The network was at ~ 40 Phps? At 5% of the network there's a one in a million chance they would have not have found a block solomining by the time they had been running for 1.68 days. They could have detected the problem with five nines certainty after only 1.4 days.

If they really did have 5% of the network (and I'm not just mis-remembering) I'd be really surprised if they didn't know about it before-hand.

How does it benefit the attacker if it was intentional? I'm still very confused by this whole ordeal.

If they had originally planned to solomine then they might have found that they couldn't solve a block solomining. In that case, they could at least mine at a pool and still get btc income - even if they weren't contributing any blocks.