Problem is that this was not particularly bad luck. You can't call it consistent either, because they mined for a very short time.
Complaints started when their mining was at a CDF of about 70% which is just silly.
Even at 95% CDF you may think this is really rare, but it's not. If you crashed your car 1 out of 20 times you drove, would you still say that's so rare you would never expect it to happen?
I'd suggest we finally do the hardfork on bitcoin that has been suggested long ago, which would make block withholding impossible.
Concerns were raised because of:
- a history of other pools being abused
- the very large size of the user, with no pedigree of success on other pools
- the risk of others using the pass through to veil their exploitation of the pool
- the opaque means that flound makes a profit with this venture
- below expected returns from multipool
The combination of those items make it very likely that users were being exploited by multipool. It's called Bayesian analysis. And at 70%, with the additional data it was perfectly rational to start asking questions.
With PPLNS your incentives are not aligned with your users. You lose nothing when the pool is being exploited. You collect your cut regardless and just distribute the rewards unfairly. That means users like me have to be watching carefully. Given his response, I think it is very likely that Flound knows, or at least suspects that some of his users are exploiting the pool. I have to wonder how far you would have allowed things to progress.
A hard fork of bitcoin is out of the question, for the same reasons that countries almost never rewrite their constitutions. Too many competing interests would attempt to force their interests into the hard fork, and consensus would be impossible to reach. We are already past the point where a super majority favorable to public pools could even be formed.
A revision to stratum is possible, and I'm quite surprised it isn't being actively driven by pool operators.