Status as of Friday, April 6, 2018

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good morning!

• The new mining server installation has been delayed until today. One of the memory modules ordered from purse.io was defective. Chris will need to obtain a replacement, but he thinks he can drive about 50 miles and get one for installation tonight.
• The connection switchover has been postponed. Comcast sent a message yesterday suddenly changing the install date to April 24. We'll be removing the messages from all accounts. Updated: after calling them to complain, they may be able to install tomorrow.
• I'll be working on all the support tickets this morning, then I will move on to low-luck mining, a problem with CPU usage that is still plaguing only the primary mining server, and some odd math with static coin miners.
• In regards to the low-luck miners, here's the latest update: the majority of identified customers are renting hashrate from cloud mining services. As pointed out yesterday, we know what is wrong, but now we're currently working to determine who in the chain of people, from the manufacturer to the renter to the cloud mining service, is responsible. If you are renting hashrate from cloud mining services and are identified as having low luck, I recommend ceasing rentals from that service until the investigation is complete. Until the investigation is completed, I urge customers not to make accusations against any person or service, as there are many more victims involved than people at fault.

[Eyedol-X]

Good morning!

• The new mining server installation has been delayed until today. One of the memory modules ordered from purse.io was defective. Chris will need to obtain a replacement, but he thinks he can drive about 50 miles and get one for installation tonight.
• The connection switchover has been postponed. Comcast sent a message yesterday suddenly changing the install date to April 24. We'll be removing the messages from all accounts. Updated: after calling them to complain, they may be able to install tomorrow.
• I'll be working on all the support tickets this morning, then I will move on to low-luck mining, a problem with CPU usage that is still plaguing only the primary mining server, and some odd math with static coin miners.
• In regards to the low-luck miners, here's the latest update: the majority of identified customers are renting hashrate from cloud mining services. As pointed out yesterday, we know what is wrong, but now we're currently working to determine who in the chain of people, from the manufacturer to the renter to the cloud mining service, is responsible. If you are renting hashrate from cloud mining services and are identified as having low luck, I recommend ceasing rentals from that service until the investigation is complete. Until the investigation is completed, I urge customers not to make accusations against any person or service, as there are many more victims involved than people at fault.

Anyone can sell a rig on MRR and my guess is that there may be poisoned sellers over there purposely selling "low luck" rigs to those that don't know better. OR There is something to do with how their proxy works that is affecting luck which could point the finger at the way cloud mining services work with proxies.

It sounds like a crazy challenge to figure out who is responsible past the proxy as I would imagine it would shield the responsible party(ies)

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good morning!

• The new mining server installation has been delayed until today. One of the memory modules ordered from purse.io was defective. Chris will need to obtain a replacement, but he thinks he can drive about 50 miles and get one for installation tonight.
• The connection switchover has been postponed. Comcast sent a message yesterday suddenly changing the install date to April 24. We'll be removing the messages from all accounts. Updated: after calling them to complain, they may be able to install tomorrow.
• I'll be working on all the support tickets this morning, then I will move on to low-luck mining, a problem with CPU usage that is still plaguing only the primary mining server, and some odd math with static coin miners.
• In regards to the low-luck miners, here's the latest update: the majority of identified customers are renting hashrate from cloud mining services. As pointed out yesterday, we know what is wrong, but now we're currently working to determine who in the chain of people, from the manufacturer to the renter to the cloud mining service, is responsible. If you are renting hashrate from cloud mining services and are identified as having low luck, I recommend ceasing rentals from that service until the investigation is complete. Until the investigation is completed, I urge customers not to make accusations against any person or service, as there are many more victims involved than people at fault.

Anyone can sell a rig on MRR and my guess is that there may be poisoned sellers over there purposely selling "low luck" rigs to those that don't know better. OR There is something to do with how their proxy works that is affecting luck which could point the finger at the way cloud mining services work with proxies.

It sounds like a crazy challenge to figure out who is responsible past the proxy as I would imagine it would shield the responsible party(ies)

Well, as far as I can tell, nobody else has ever had the resources to analyze this problem. Someone who rents a miner from a cloud mining service and tries to solo mine hasn't recorded 100GB of data like we have since Sunday about the issue. Without an enormous amount of data, the issue is not detectable by the typical renter who points his miners at a pool, or who solo mines for a short while and rarely finds litecoin blocks. Just a few hours ago, I determined definitively that the issue has been present since at least 2015.

The scale of this issue is staggering. Since we haven't found any reason to suspect that we're special in having low luck miners on our pool, it is possible to extrapolate that if this is purposeful, the lower bound on what has been "stolen" from renters is $50m. Having found this, we will be getting the police involved if we conclude that fraud is definitely the cause.

There are a number of people who could be responsible. The cloud mining services themselves could be involved, but I doubt that; these are big businesses. Plus, the issue seems present across all cloud mining services, which rules out one service in particular.

The other possibilities are that people are pointing rigs at the cloud mining services who know the rigs are defective, that someone modifies the firmware in these devices and scams cloud miners who buy machines on eBay, or that the defective firmware is present out of the factory. There is insufficient evidence to prove any of these as of yet because we haven't been collecting the detailed data for long enough.

The missing piece that is hindering me, and which would significantly speed up this investigation, is what the goal of the scheme is. I still haven't been able to determine how anyone who purposefully modifies miners gains out of doing it. It seems to me that modifications expose the miner to the risk of frozen balances, legal action, or arrest, while not actually earning them anything. That's why there is still an outstanding reward to turn anyone who is willing to explain the purpose of the scheme.

In the short term, we need to allow everyone to continue mining to increase confidence in our data. In the medium term, the solution might be to publicly disclose the detection algorithms and, after a period of time, ban all cloud mining services that do not implement it. These algorithms represent a significant competitive advantage, and cost tens of thousands of dollars to develop, but putting an end to this for the community may be a greater good. The long-term solution is to use the legal system to compel information out of ISPs and identify defendants.

For those who believe they were erroneously identified, we will be releasing an even better version of the new algorithm on Sunday, once we've had a few more days to get this detailed data, which will eliminate even more initial false positives without having to wait for luck to normalize.

[TOYJB]

I manage my own rigs and my account was flagged as low luck. How do i fix that? And when will my balance be released.

[Steve Sokolowski]

I manage my own rigs and my account was flagged as low luck. How do i fix that? And when will my balance be released.

Could you tell me more about your setup?

Do you solo or static mine? What type of miners are they? How many miners do you use? What is your username?

[TOYJB]

I pointed my SHA256 rig to prohash. 9x Antminer s7's and 7x avalon 6s. Account name TOYJB. Put a=sha-256 in the password field.

[TOYJB]

I had submitted a ticket a couple days ago when the alert popped up. Can you please look into it and get back to me? At least confirm I'm not renting rigs and release my payment...feel like i was mining for nothing.