Time to address the elephant in the room f2pool NOT processing transactions

whats more disturbing to me is that a member of the electroneum team who is being mocked in that twitter, has taken the time to respond multiple times to that twitter, but we have not heard anything from the team at all… are they more concerned with keeping their clout among monero devs or responding to the electroneum community?

its not too much to ask for a “we’re aware of this, this is what we think” because perhaps they do have a fantastic explanation about whats going on, maybe they can take some time to point out to folks there are some instances where empty blocks will occur, and thats the truth, but they are also aware of the times when it should not and they are doing X Y Z or will have an update for us in the upcoming week on this…

for those who don’t know, there WILL be empty blocks sometimes at this stage of the coin, we sometimes blow through all the transactions and nothing is left to process, and thats when its okay, when its not okay is where we see a lot of older transactions sitting and waiting to be processed but then a chain of multiple blocks pops up processing no transactions, thats when we should be annoyed…

the whole purpose of miners is to move along the network and process transactions, if pools are intentionally avoiding this, they are essentially contributing nothing to the network, they are delaying our transactions, even if just 10min or 20min its still getting paid to do nothing for electroneum, and that shouldn’t sit well with anyone, especially not people who have time to respond to monero devs on twitter but ignore us…

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The point is, that the mempool is full of transactions (some been there for 1hr+) but there is 9 sequential empty blocks being mined and the transactions are still sat in the mempool. Yesterday there was transactions in the mempool that were 9hrs old!
If there is no tx to be processed then empty blocks are fine, but this is not the case here.

Again I can only agree what I have written in my excel. Just click to my name and you find it. There is writen more communicate with community about problems. Hire some senior developer because the holy grail is the blockchain and not the marketing that we still didn’t see. They still spaming the Facebook and Twitter with articles about kyc from 5 October… I read all of them multiple times but don’t need to see 5* per day. App did not allow me to mine and I have lvl 1kyc… So and I think that everyone who watch media is yet confirmed and have KYC…

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The problem is monero community hate us and you will be seen working at the dark side if you join etn.

Yes they are posting way to much on Facebook and not answering enough questions on the forum I feel.

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What is the best thing they can do about it?

(simple explanation if possible as I’m a simple non-miner!)

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News fatigue come to mind

and I responded directly to this in my response if you read the whole thing and quoted the entire posting you would see I addressed that, its okay when there is nothing to do, but clearly we have been seeing instances where there are transactions to process and they are being ignored, thats why I started this entire thread after all…

some examples of these “piggybacking” blocks as I call them…

as you can see they definitely come in bulk, and if I had taken snapshots of the mempool at the time you would see there were transactions waiting to be processed older than the beginning of these chains, and THAT is what we need addressed and a response to, pools getting paid while not processing transactions is an issue we agree on, and thats what I am trying to bring attention to…

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I understand the basics of a blockchain, mining, pools, POW ect. I ran into the empty block issue in this post for the first time and read nearly all the comments by members about it. But, are empty blocks really thad bad? Following youtube video might interest you to widen your view about it…
About empty blocks

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Not sure if there’s much that can be done, it’s PoW after all.
69.9 % of Pools Hashrate belongs to f2pool…

Our choice was better either exploit GPU minings difficulty adjustment algorithm or choose the most profitable ASIC alternative, ETN choose ASIC.
I think the only way is getting more ASIC miners in other pools or to convince f2pool miners to change pools but good luck with that.

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after 4-5hrs downtime, the BC is back up and running, and i have to say its looking like its running as it should. I will be keeping an eye on it, but early indications are that they have fixed it.

EDIT: Few empty blocks still but not as many as before. Will keep refreshing and hope for the best

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The blockchain itself has never been down.
The explorer website however, where you can watch transactions, Tx Pool and search blockchain transactions has been under maintenance, but this has nothing to do with the blockchain

The two biggest pools which control 95% combined hashpower were not following the blockheight. I did say in my other post it may have just been the Explorer they were tinkering with. I am unsure if that was part of the main problem because i know there was a “timestamp bug” in the Explorer since March. Dont know for sure but worth pointing out.

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Alternate chains are sometimes created, I’ve seen the explorer following and displaying the old and wrong chain before. At the moment we have no alt_chains

status
Height: 399121/399120 (100.0%) on mainnet, not mining, net hash 6.02 GH/s, v7, up to date, 8(out)+3(in) connections, uptime 0d 0h 9m 30s
alt_chain_info
0 alternate chains found:

Fixing the website does not fix the validation-less mining of “empty blocks” issue

I am not sure if they want to fix the code to prevent this, because it could affect the incentive to mine&secure our blockchain.

Changing code to force pool of asic miners to idle and wait for the last mined block to validate is probably not the way to go.

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I just figured out that monero is also creating empty blocks here and there. Sometimes even a couple in a row.

The explanation could be here:


at 3:15 . Yes smeone posted this already.

Pretty much what they say is that there is some legitimate ways how empty blocks can be created for example when a block is found the other miners dont just stop while some miners process transactions they keep mining and if they find another block it will be an empty one.

I would like to see an official statement as well though but I think its normal behaviour of the blockchain.

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to address both of you at the same time, I understand how empty blocks work, I also understand how pools works when they are intentionally dumping the mempool without a “short period of time” between blocks, I will put add an image demonstrating what I am talking about to clear it up real nicely for you guys since you’re confused over whats happening and the impact, this is not unintentional actions, its intentional…

in the bottom of the picture we can see 3 blocks found, the one at “height 399415” includes a transaction, so we know that block processed transactions that were available at the time, then we can see the next block at “height 399416” which came 6 minutes LATER (clearly not a pool finding it quick) has ignored transactions sitting in the mempool for the past 6 minutes, in fact when you look at the image we can see there are numerous transactions that have been waiting for almost 5 minutes, which means the pools intentionally ignoring them… they were WELL propagated across the network, there was no missing them or not receiving them, they were intentionally dumped by the pool and ignored, meaning they are NOT processing transactions that are ready and available because they don’t want anyone else to squeeze a solution in before their solution is agreed on by the network, shaving seconds off matters sometimes and they are choosing to willfully NOT process transactions to gain that…

and THAT is not okay, its intentional, its malicious, and as far as I am concerned they need to be put on public blast for doing so, they are KNOWN to do it to other coins as I cited in my links starting this thread, they recently started doing it again with ethereum and other coins, not because they are finding blocks too quick, but because they are intentionally trying to gain a couple seconds making their blocks quicker to propagate and process and get confirmed on the network so they “win” the reward… this does NOTHING for the blockchain, we all sit and wait until another pool doing things the right way comes along to process those transactions, and that should upset all of you immensely…

so look I get it, you are trying to “help” and try to get me to understand it happens sometimes, I understand that very well, which is also why I understand how much of an offense this is to notice this clear and intentional act on our network, they are basically getting paid to perform a task, process transactions, and they are NOT doing it, yet they are getting the rewards for it anyhow, nobody should think thats okay…

Anyone knows where to find a list of blocks that f2pool is finding ? That would make it easy to check if it even has to do with them.

This has to stop. This is more trade cheating/stealing by China. This is not political, it’s criminal. 883 transactions in pool and 5 empty blocks in a row and the moment of this typing.

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These problems we have after the last quick fix by @andrepatta I dont know if there is some mistake or if the monopol of one big asic pool make this problem… Zou are corect almost 1000 transaction right now…
Here you can check the backlog: https://electroneum101.com/statistics/mempool-size.php