Quote from: krisgt30 on February 21, 2016, 05:02:17 PM

Do you even realize that none of us speaking are pool operators (other than ck)? All I have been saying is, just because it was okay in the past for pools to have the mentality of "oh well, we had a block withholding attack, nothing we can do about it." ----Does not mean here in 2016--- with difficulty being so high, and virtually every home/hobby miner resorting to mining in a pool because of the centralization of hashrate, that it should still be accepted; nor the norm.

You would expect an OG pool such as slush to understand this more than anyone, and maybe, to have a reserve set aside from his fees, to say something to the effect of "hey guys, we just had a withholding attack, but I set apart an insurance policy wallet for just the occasion, you will not be paid out based on the average amount of blocks we find a day for the current month, oh and btw the ip address, machine, firmware in question is xxxxxx, that would go over with all of us wayyyyy better than what has happened. Maybe I grew up in an area of the world where we are taught to be much less trustworthy than some of you, and that is why it appears to us that you are blindly following.

I guess maybe I am hoping for too much, but for someone who claims to have an extensive past in the banking industry, something like this would exactly be in place.

Actually, I totally understand the argument for such attacks not being accepted as the norm, but that one happened to slush can not make the pool responsible for such an attack happening. You also need to know that this pool mining phenomenon is not even a decade old, so is still evolving, and in most aspects, slush is the leader in improvements to the protocol. I am confident that future block with-holding attacks, on any pool going forward, will be easier to detect on the back of the fantastic work the slushpool team put to identifying the attack on the pool.

That said, we as miners can not expect to have our cake and eat it at the same time, and that is with regard to expecting the pools to re-imburse us when they are the victim of, for example a with-holding attack, but then demand low to no fees for mining at the pool. Insurance policies have a cost and that would inevitably have to be met by the miners, which would mean an increase in fees.

Bottom line, we are where we are, and slush can not be blamed for being attacked. The pool is one of the most resillient on the network as was demonstrated during the recent DDoS attacks targeting pools / nodes voting for BIP101, but block with-holding attacks, as has been demonstrated, are not easily detectable ..... well, it had to come to pass for it to get on the radar.

Now, unless you believe slush should have a crystal ball to know what kind of threat / attack is next on the horizon, I'll take their word for what it truly is worth over some opinion that has been pumped up based on false information by a dishonest pool op fishing for miners.

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