Well my timing (for that Avalon 6) could have been better, but very happy I finally found one for Kano! Previous block, not this latest.

It's a combination of laziness, greed, and short term thinking.

Laziness because ckpool code is out there, free. I've played with it myself. It's not hard, but it does take a small amount of effort. Any of the big pools could put forth this effort and get ckpool working for themselves, or design their own pool code that didn't SPV mine.

Greed because getting the 25 BTC block reward is more important to them than anything else, including processing transactions or ensuring that the block they are building on is valid.

Short term thinking because if they continue down this path and continue to drag the majority of miners with them, they will eventually cause another fork that will confuse people, especially outsiders, and reduce the overall trustworthiness (value) of Bitcoin.

I think there is something lost in translation because macbook-air doesn't seem to understand that he did threaten kano.is pool and he did lie. The point of the discussion on SPV mining is to get people to stop doing it, but it is being taken personally. As was mentioned elsewhere, there are plenty of ways to damage a SPV pool. Calling them out and trying to convince them to change isn't one of them. Instead of reacting with threats, macbook-air should be reacting with appreciation. The path to stop SPV mining couldn't be laid out any easier for them.

I have a U3 sitting on my desk that hit a 33 billion share the other day. I took a screen shot before I had to reboot the laptop. http://imgur.com/lFmFqI2

@macbook-air
Do you mean that you'll intentionally not build on blocks from Kano.is? I think you need to clarify what you mean by blacklist.

@Nuttycoins
Slush's method already does something like this. The cool off period is faster than the warm up period, so, for example, if you have a power outage at an inopportune time you could potentially take a large hit for timing a block wrong when your intention wasn't to pool hop. What you are suggesting would do the same here. I get what you are saying, and understand your point, just disagree.

To some of the regular posters here, I'm curious about reaction to this https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=441465.msg13062153#msg13062153

If you don't want to follow the link, apparently 6 * Difficulty shares have been pointed at Eligius from Nicehash and not one block solve yet. Relevant here I think because many of us use Nice/Westhash to gamble.

Haha, get 'em Kano. I was going to mention something like that - while I do trust wizkid057 I have also just about run out of trust with Eligius several times when there are payout / pool issues and things get backed up. While Eligius pays coinbase generation payouts, not every miner gets their coins paid with every block find. The system is queuing up payments, which means (and it has been documented) that the pool does hold a lot of coin that it hasn't paid its miners. Because of that, you can't put P2Pool and Eligius in the same boat regarding trust.

There's a huge difference between a newbie and someone like Kano and ck putting together a pool and code. Those two are able to be completely trusted due to their involvement in the community. We already trust cgminer, etc. It's not a fair comparison.

We're in no danger of kano's pool taking over the world. That's crazy talk. Antpool exists to run Bitmain's farm, and so long as it and Bitfury exist, there's plenty of balance. Kano could grow to 50 PH and we'd still have a stable distribution.

When I first got into mining I did a lot of calculations on payment methods and my conclusion was that Eclipse's DGM at 0% fee was the best compromise. I'm not going to pull all the math out again because it isn't relevant. What is relevant is the trust you have for the operator, which killed Eclipse. With f2pool, antpool, and btcc PPS you have a maximum of two days loss if they skip a payment and then fail. That's relatively little risk, so they are easier to trust. A larger pool that can prove itself by making regular and frequent payouts is also easier to trust. Its harder to trust a pool with a lower hash rate simply because you are paid less frequently. A pool like kano.is can go multiple days without a block / payment and then if the pool were to fail you would have a loss of multiple days of hash. Consider the way HHTT shut down. That was a good pool and honest, but people still perceived that they lost something in the end.

The only reason anyone could have used logic to mine here was by weighing the risk to the reward. The first block finder reward was the reward that balanced out the risk for some, and there were also promises of extra payments for others in the top however many miners. Aside from that there was too much risk to mine here.

You can make arguments against the Chinese pools all day, fees, etc, but in the end people are going to trust them more than low hash rate pools simply because of the lower risk. It is more than variance that factors in. Nexious is a case in point.

BTW, even if the operator comes back with some kind of explanation at this point and pays the miners out, it would not be logical to continue mining at this pool. The risk of the pool's stability and dependence on the operator has been proven too great. The pool is dead.

It appeared he was using Microsoft's cloud for his server and mailgun.org for his email. Either of those places should have more info on him, including his payment info, that may help track him down. Just in case anyone is interested.

The longer this goes the more likely it was a scam. Its also possible he got hacked and doesn't own the private key with that coin on it, among other possibilities. The timing of the disappearance and the simultaneous disconnection of other services suggests scam. Considering how much effort he put into the scam it is likely he's obfuscated his information on those sites as well.

I'd just like to point out that the entire premise of this pool was faulty. There are fair and trusted pools that already "help decentralize the network" including kano.is. The problem isn't that there aren't pools, the problem is that there are nearsighted people who have no patience and would rather mine at a larger pool in order to decrease their variance. I'd love to see people flock to a pool like Kano.is so it was hitting blocks more regularly. That's really all that is necessary for many people to bring their hash back from the large PPS pools. A pool like Nexious was harming rather than helping in this regard.

We've seen pools with 6 times (or more) the current difficulty before finding a block. In other words, you could spend 150 coins to receive 25. Or you could get 25 coins with a 0.20 investment. It is a simple gamble, not a way to make guaranteed profit by any stretch of the imagination.

So as to how profitable? It can be wildly profitable, but it will most likely be a losing prospect over time due to fees involved.

It would be impossible to get consensus when so much of the existing hash is being done by these hardware companies. It's logical that they built farms with significant enough hash power to prevent this sort of disruption from happening and to protect their hardware business. I'm curious how you would deal with that.

EDIT: Oops I managed to post in a thread whose primary purpose is for people to get their quotas for their advertising campaigns. The ignore button is getting hot.

It was orphaned because the pool that decided which block would win was the same as the one that benefitted from winning.

EDIT: I also suspect that if another pool (such as Eligius) had orphaned the F2Pool blocks that came after that in favor of your block that a subsequent F2Pool block would not have agreed and we would have had a deeper fork. I think the problem here is that everyone is relying on bitcoin-core to do the right thing when it is entirely possible that a modified version is not playing by the same rules.

Well, that begs the question then, should a pool submit a block that it happens to solve between the time that it sees a new block solved by a different pool and before its workers are able to be updated with new work based on that new block? To intentionally create a fork just in case it sticks instead of the other one. How ethical is it to do so when, because of your hash rate, you have a high probability of being the pool that decides which branch to follow? How about a group of pools banding together to always support each other: In an orphan race I'll always favor blocks from a set of pools I like over a set of pools I don't like. Basically the 51% issue camouflaged to look like there are separate pools. Is it happening?

Stirring the pot.

Every gambler has a system. It's all about luck though. For someone who hits a block spending 0.20 on a rental there's someone who could spend 25, 50, or more and still not hit anything.

EDIT: And the people who spent that much gambling and losing aren't as likely to post telling you how bad a decision they made as those who won. I feel like this thread should have a "if you think you have a gambling problem.." tagline. Haha. But the sad thing is that I say this also for my own benefit...

In the middle of that run of 6-in-a-row from F2Pool.....

I fail to see how going from 5N to 2N would attract any new miners. If one of the people proposing that could describe it, that would be a discussion, but I see no discussion just assertion.

On the other hand, 5N reduces luck variance for the long-term miners, which is important for a pool that desires to keep people mining long-term. That has been described many times throughout this thread and others. Anyone who can't wait 5N for a full reward is unlikely to be patient enough to stay for long anyway. It boggles the mind why this pool isn't more popular, but I'm glad Kano is happy with the size it is. BTCGuild was ~10N and was extremely popular, so not everyone is statistically challenged.

It's like the reward experiment with little kids: Place a jelly bean in front of a 4 year old and tell her that she can eat it now, but if she can wait 5 minutes before eating it she can have a second one. 3 of my 4 kids waited. The majority of miners can't help themselves and eat the jelly bean right away.

That's excellent news! I also use his service at Kano.is for a couple of miners that occasionally go flaky and it is solid and very useful.

I believe it is already pretty known. It is one of the better and more reasonable arguments against increasing the block size too much that I've heard, in my opinion anyway. As blocks get bigger, the propagation time would also increase and amplify the effect you describe. It puts pools on slower connections or with inferior software/hardware at a greater disadvantage. Or, even the opposite, for example, a large pool or set of pools in China could build blocks off themselves or each other faster than they could propagate it elsewhere.

Well I don't think they can because there is little to none left at this point, at least not easily traceable. Someone thinks they can or they wouldn't be piling on. I'm just saying that it is important to get your lawsuit and/or claim in early rather than drag your feet like they have been doing. There is not much of a chance either way, but it is significantly better the sooner you file. In other words, the current lawsuit makes no sense from lots of angles. Even if you took them at their word, the fact they are still dragging their feet just means that the one chance at being legitimate they had and doing good for anyone (getting any money at all) gets smaller the longer they wait, and at this point it is an exercise in futility. My point was that this strengthens the argument that the lawsuit is a facade. There's no logic in it even if you take them at their word.

They knew GAW was a scam before the electric bill judgment happened. They should have had this in court before that point.

About the only satisfaction anyone who was burned by this will get at this point is to see some people behind bars.