Kinlo, as the pool OP, could you please address the above questions. They are not fully addressed on your last post. I am sure miners are interested.
In addition very reputable members of this forum have sent me some private comms. They used to mine at your pool in the past but have now moved to other pools with much better results. It seems you have blocked a few accounts at your pool in the last few weeks. It also seems that you are keeping their mining revenue for you and you have not released payments for what they have actually mined? Since miners also have to pay their bills like electricity and so on, I am sure they are not happy about that. Can you please explain to the miners of your pool in what cases will you be keeping their mining work for your own benefit? Why are you keeping their revenues to yourself?
Can you please open up the policies and practices of your pool?
Your clarification will be appreciated.
The name of a minipool can be anything. It's not because they put anything in their name that they actually are those people or that they have bad intentions.
If we look at the "bad luck" streak, then the most important thing to remember is that this is not normal, just enlarged because we are not a big pool. Every pool has these bad luck streaks, but if our hashrate would be 10 TH, it would be over in a day and nobody would even remember. It's just because we are a small pool that it *looks* like we're a bad luck pool, while in fact we are not, we've had many good rounds.
Also important to remember is that bitcoin mining has no "memory". Bad or good luck from the past does NOT influence the future. I can understand that people are moving away, but they are doing so because they *think* the pool is bad. If you look at the hard numbers, it isn't. If you know how statistics work, if you fully understand the math, it is actually a bad move to go away. There aren't a lot of pools that are this rewarding in the long term. You just have to think about long term commitment, and have to remember that luck on a pool has no memory. If you poolhop, you will probably always loose, you will join when the pool is lucky (but then it's already too late, you've missed the biggest effect of the good luck) or you will leave when it's bad luck (but then you will leave at a point where you definitely made a loss, while due to the no-memory property, you will just maximize your losses and removing all chances on fully profiting from a good luck streak)
As for the blocking of users and keeping their funds: it has to be very clear that we
do not keep funds for ourselves. To go back to your first question: there are people that are doing bad things for the pool. You shouldn't look at their pool name or the amount of members of their minipool (which basically says nothing), but at their mining behaviour, something we can see as pool admins but are not visible in any stats. It is true that there are some people abusing the pool by overloading the poolservers with requests. You should know that we as triplemining are taking active steps against those abusers. It is only those clients that you should worry about, because every time we need to serve a request to an abuser, is one less request we can take from an honest, good miner. While we currently are having enough capacity to handle the requests, it would be a bad thing not to take any action, as those abusers would just grow and would cause bad performance for everybody. Do note the use of the word performance, it should not have a great influence on luck as miners should retry to submit results if it fails the first time.
Unfortunately, it just doesn't work to politely ask people to stop abusing the pool. That would be like asking thieves not to steal, but just let them go on stealing. That would just encourage more people to steal
So we need to do something more drastically, and unfortunately I know no other way than to temporary block their payouts. It is very important to know that this is a measurement we are forced to take, and that we do not like doing this. As soon as the abuse stops on our pool,
we always release the lock, so all funds are back available to these people. As some are really abusing our service, I must say that in a way we are too nice to these people, but I do not want to give any person the impression that we are stealing anything, and there might be cases where people just don't know they are doing something wrong, so I'm giving everybody the benefit of the doubt. We just ask that they set up a proxy server, so they can pay themselves for the processing power it requires server-side, and that they actually move
all their clients to their own server. And all means all, we do are very strict at that point, but it is in everybody's interest: they can continue doing what they want, and they will no longer hurt the pool
Does this answer all of your questions?
Well kinlo, I think your answer says everything.
You are in your own words judging between as you say "honest" miners and "bad performance" miners, "thieves" as you say, or in other words "expensive low hash miners for your pool available resources".
But may be you are making the wrong judgment? The miners that we are talking about are not junior miners, I assure.
And you also recognize to be blocking payments just
after blocks have been found and miners have performed work,
which you should not be doing in any case. First pay for mined work, then warn if you need to do so, provide proof and then block any accounts for future mining if you really feel you need to do that.
Since your pool does not immediately pay when a block is found as some other pools do, it's easy stuff for you to do funny things, pay as you wish and to whom you wish, right?
At least now people know (in your own words) they are at risk when mining at your pool. You never know what's going to happen after a block has been found (probably taking a week or more at your current speed). May be by surprise they login and pum, your account has been frozen, your payment on hold, never know, right? The op guy looked at their mining behavior in his non-visible stats and judged they do not deserve payment for their work, they should either install some proxy soft, becoming in fact their own server, to save pool resources or eat shit? is that it?
Now, thanks to the miners that contacted me, we have jointly accessed those accounts at your pool and, as you very well know,
you are still keeping their funds and payments are blocked and freezed on several accounts. So you are not being an honest guy when you say you always unlock. And this even when they have stopped mining at your pool for several weeks now (0 hashes should mean no damage at all to your pool resources). In plain English
you are keeping the funds to yourself.
You mention that you are "too nice" to them, but at the same time you are blocking their payments and calling them thieves, which for you, as I understand, it means stealers of your pool resources. Now, who is the real thief here?
In the name of these honorable miners and all miners of the world, do release all the pending payments to these guys for the mining work they have as a matter of fact performed. Then block their accounts as you wish, they are long gone and they do not care!
And by the way kinlo, for a pool of your size, low hashing and "low performers" should be a majority. Just by looking at your visible stats, this is the case, so you should better make it ready to accept many more of those if you want your so-called minipools to succeed.
And regarding your "bad luck streaks" another "old friend of yours" that just PM'ed me wanted to mention that he's still throwing squid when remembering the "bad luck streak" that your pool had during the weeks previous to block halving in November. It seems math has no place in your pool at some very specific periods.
So kinlo, WTF, it seems you have been handing around quite a bit of shit and a few nightmares to your own miners for sometime now... Hopefully you will change the way you are doing things.
