I am figuring it is a botnet.  With botnets reaching past 1 million computers someone must have selected a group of computers with good GPU's in them.  Imagine good GPU's in 1% of machines, breaking them off as a seperate botnet.  Now run them at low levels, do not run them hard enough for fans to get aggressive or any slowdown.  10,000 machines could make 2TH ran slowly.  The internet connection usage would be kept to a minimum by only getting the bare minimum information (no transactions) and relaying back only when a block is found.  This could live under the radar on a machine for a long time if they did nothing else with the pwned machine.   And for $3000 a day, they would not have to resort to any other uses. 

Of course it could be 5000-50000 machines in play....  But this is what I think it is. 

This alone does not explain the drop in "luck"; however when combined with discarding the golden nonces on legitimate miners it does make a lot of sense. Why discard the golden nonces? To lower the overall difficulty

-1 for saying "golden nonces".

Copy/Paste on request from: https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/69340



Regarding the mystery miner being discussed in https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/67634.200 ... (originally at 88.6.216.9 and now at 85.214.124.168):

A little while ago they mined four blocks in the space of 1 hour:

http://blockchain.info/block-height/171757
http://blockchain.info/block-height/171759
http://blockchain.info/block-height/171760
http://blockchain.info/block-height/171763

Interestingly, the timestamps on their two consecutive blocks 171759 (2012-03-18 19:31:32) and 171760 (2012-03-18 19:31:30) are out of order! This implies to me that either there are some shenanigans I don't understand the point of, or this is a botnet without good clock sync.

Can someone explain what the timestamp field is used for?

ps: someone who isn't limited to the newbie forum, please copy+paste this post to the myster miner thread.

On the one hand, you're right. If I recall correctly, ArtForz once put it along these lines: Above 50% you're effectively competing against yourself. While it would not directly mean the end of BTC (let's say the >50% miner is benevolent), but it would probably make people feel so uneasy that the trust in bitcoin would deteriorate more and more, probably to the point where the whole things falls apart.

So actually what you'd probably want to do in case you have all the up-front work and cost of ASIC covered is to sell about 50% of your production at the highest price you can get and put the other 50% into your own farm.

If it is a botnet that continues 1 trans blocks (or any fakery of non-real transactions),  i hope they realize that anything over 25% will cause the community to really work hard to stop it, and that the distortion of both the selling of the coins and the lost confidence will actually make them have LESS PROFIT.  Adding too many machines will kill their $3000 a day. 

Any genius idea how you can do that ? BTC is not ran by a maniac like RealScam that can turn off clients he does not like with his pig nodes.

If this guy reaches over 50% then we are all royally screwed. BTC is inherently insecure and somebody really needs to fix the 51% issue.

"It will not happen" is not a technological fix and just a lame ass excuse to avoid working on improving the blockchain POW system we currently have.

Nobody is perfect, not even Satoshi or BTC ...

BTW the IP is now http://blockchain.info/ip-address/85.214.124.168

Never, ever underestimate the stupidity of a script kiddie.
I just had a script kiddie threaten all kinds of DDoS type of attacks on our business, and even log entries with his IP trying to gain access to one of our control panels, and he threatened under his own name, his full contact details inputted into our system and publicly available, and he hosts warez sites under his real identity.
Googling his name resulted in his facebook, google plus accounts plus a lot of other information confirming his identity.

Script kiddies are the most intellectually challenged, ego driven maniacs you can think of. certain things just don't "compute" for them.

and that's not even the only case, i've seen people bragging about doing DoS type of attacks, under their own real name, all verifiable what has happened, and every bit of evidence pointing to them, like asking to get jailed!

As for 51% attack, as bitcoin grows it becomes even harder and harder to pull of, eventually being near impossible to pull of. Before that point is met, it's just expected that some people might come close to that. But as BTC value drives up, so does miner rewards and that much harder it becomes!

Doesn't take a genious to do the maths.
If there is 500Th going on, even getting BFL Minirigs (15k $, ~20Ghash/s) at 10% price would require 375 000 000$ to make 50% ... Nevermind the ~3.1MW consumption ...