And f2pool is at it again, manipulating the blockchain

recently f2pool has started a new bad behavior on the network, they are “swinging” the difficulty by cycling miners on and off… they are doing this to essentially get the same amount of reward while consuming less energy to do it, this is possible when you have a large enough amount of the hash power…

so they have gone from mining empty blocks, providing no benefit to the network, to also now “swinging” the difficulty to get the same amount of rewards at less power costs, once again providing no benefit to the network and merely attempting to “game the system” to their benefit at the cost of the network…

“swinging” the difficulty has negative benefits, we go from longer periods between blocks to very rapid periods between blocks, rather than a stable time period between them so the network is more consistent and reliable, this may not be as bad as mining empty blocks, but its clear they are NOT supporters…

I think it may be time to hear from Electroneum on f2pool and their continued abuse of the network for financial gains while not providing the services the network needs to move forward in a stable and reliable fashion (after all thats why block rewards exist, to encourage providing those services)…

it may be worth time to discuss alternatives to the asics, and explore “nuclear options” if we’re going to have this great an abuse for profit, if they won’t contribute, its time to change so they have to or they will stop being rewarded… I’m not sure how others feel, but if you don’t do the work, you shouldn’t get paid for it…

I didnt see any proof for that empty block thing yet.
I also checked moneros chain and I also saw some empty blocks there while the memory pool wasnt completely empty. So couldnt it be that is has somehow to do with the monero software and not with the pools. Maybe its some kind of feature ?

I have been watching for a very long time now and there have been many times where there are thousands of transactions waiting and they were with 4 GH/s mining many empty blocks in a row.
I’m in favor of the nuclear options.

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Very Interesting. This was one of the Main Reasons that Richard binned GPU Mining in Favour of ASIC’s. Someone/Somewhere was manipulating Difficulty swings and now F2P are doing it with their ASIC’s/FPGA’s.

The swings are not as bad with the ASIC’s but this just goes to show how Industrial scale mining prioritises nothing but “Profit”

The best thing that can happen here is ETN Price to skyrocket and this will attract more people to buy X3 Miners making it harder for F2P to manipulate the Difficulty swings. If this doesn’t happen then Andre may have his work cut out for him.

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it’s not just f2pool there’s other pools with hash fluctuations

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Low volume, price is down profitability will be getting miners super rekt, miners adjusting hash power to difficulty range is the price we pay in the meantime to have an efficient operational blockchain. If all mining pools maxed out their hash power constantly we would see a huge price dump

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The reason they are using to mine empty blocks is on their Twitter regarding empty blocks and Ethereum. If I’m remembering correctly it’s something about their miners are complaining about a 1 second wait time before they see the block and when they remove that wait time the side effect is sometimes an empty block.
It must be technically correct because here is Chris saying it’s a genuine performance issue.

So I guess we’ll see after the next update but I have very low confidence that they won’t cheat. I think they will change it to only 5 transactions like poolin was only doing 10.

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Tell their English speaking miners directly what you think about them mining empty blocks.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=700411.560

Very good idea.

Also it looks like f2pool just lost some hashrate.

grafik

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Some bird told me the sudden increase, or dobbling, was due to party of new miners testing, with high hashpower.
Other pools waves is also due to pool hopping

If you map the variation of their hash rate to the variation of difficulty, you can infer a very small degree of causality, but it’s nothing much to worry about; it’s not disrupting the network. There is no accelerating trend, and there’s also no proof that they’re turning their machines off for this reason.

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No chance of this happening anymore so closing :slight_smile:

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