In our opinion a big problem about Chia is that pools have complete control of the owned coins.
They get hold of the 1.75 XCH and can do whatever they like with it.
Who is to say pools are not introducing fake farmers into their database? Getting extra fees without anybody knowledge? Big pools have thousands of farmers, nobody would notice fake small farmers there, each stealing ~0.5% or less of the rewards.
Pools trust is absolutely critical, but how can that be ensured?
In our opinion the only way that can be fought is with 100% open source code.
I donât think there is any way to ever have 100% of confidence on that.
The software could try to implement signatures that could verify the integrity but that can also be faked.
At least compared to closed source solutions, the code could be inspected and any changes of behavior could be confronted, instead of trusting the people behind the pool, which mind you, 95% of them do not even put their names out there.
Agree with @openchia that the problem they bring forward here is a serious one.
Although Iâm not sure if this is different from any other crypto pool?
In any case, considering the randomness of rewards and slight deviations in netspace and farmer space, i agree this could easily be done. It would take a long time for anyone to even notice or suspect, and even then hard to proof or - if you are a pool operator - disprove.
I guess open source helps, but like @slippers says then you just move the trust issue to another place.
On the other hand, damage to individual farmers is relatively low
Chia is less susceptible to this kind of skimming than other crypto, as long as the pool you join is big enough. Thatâs because you can estimate how much you should be earning based on two known pieces of information: a) how much space my plots take up, and b) the total size of the chia netspace. Nothing else matters, not even the specific size of the pool, as long as your pool is big enough to win frequently enough to approach the returns predicted by probability. If, over time, you are consistently getting less than the predicted returns then you might want to switch pools.
Very true - but i imagine the âslopâ in the âestimated plot sizeâ that is constantly shifting is somewhere the pool could arbitrage and snag 10ths of a percent for itself?
Correct. There will be different levels of confidence, but one can never be 100% sure.
Just like we donât know if physical banks do the same, we just trust them : )
I can only assume you are quite new to the crypto space. As what you bring up is no different for every pool in every cryptocurrency. Theyâll develop reputations over time. There are always more fastidious folks poking around trying to verify if the pool is paying out fairly. Evaluate any evidence they put forth and make your conclusions.
Youâre not wrong, but you may be missing the point i am raising.
Yes, trust over time plays a big part, but I am suggesting it can go completely untraceable.
Its impossible to know if all the shares are fair.
Imagine a pool winning 100 blocks a day. The wins are based on luck, so say a pool would be sneaky and add an extra 0.5% of faked share every 30 blocks or so. Since there is luck involved there is no way to tell if that deviation was because of luck or faked data. Doesnât matter how many folks are poking at it trying to verify fair payout.
Its likely a problem impossible to be solved, but doesnât make it less of a problem and demand more transparency from pools. A lot of people do not even realize this is possible.
@openchia One way of how to approach this problem is, in addition to running the main farmers, to have about 10 test farmers with a single plot each (100 GiB per test farmer) and observe which test farmer has the highest payouts per week. Then the main farmers (with many terabytes per farmer) should be those that are on the top of the test farmer payout list.
Some of the issues with this approach are that Chia network synchronization consumes CPU time, consumes a bit of space on the drive ($HOME/.chia is currently at 14 GB), and each Chia full_node consumes memory (RSS in Linux). The number of full_node processes is by default based on the number of CPUs on the machine, but the Chia source code is open source and so it can be locally modified to start a lower number of Chia full nodes (one full_node process consumes about 500 MB of memory in Linux).
Yep some professional nicehash buyers have figured out which pools on eth are scamming because they examine every cent (as their margins are 1-2%) but most regular miners donât notice because they donât miss a few %. Some OG Chia pools are clearly losing over 10% while some of the newer NFT pools are being scammed out of a bit due to exploits/bugs/stales and few notice.
the only way to prove this is by generating stable and reasonable income for the farmers continuously. fake storage makes the poolsize too large which means lesser cut so itâs less attractive these pools wont last long. big pool trick is also noticeable if the wining ratio is too low. u can see space pool is 1EB in size now but still the winning blocks rate are on par with foxypool and core-pool. btw im farming on ur pool now. win me sth
Nobody mentioned the obvious. Creating and running a decent sized pool is not a one man operation. If the pool was scamming their users, the entire team would have to be involved. So, over time, it would only take one disgruntled member of the team to expose the entire scam. In the world of IT, people move on all the time. Especially if they are crooked enough to even be involved in a scheme like that. It would not take long for a dishonest pool to be exposed.
Only the pools can cheat the users, not the other way around. Theyâre the host, if people are able to cheat them, it means theyâre not capable enough to open the pool in the first place or thereâs something that they need to fix in order to protect every member in the pool.
Thatâs why I replot my OG plots to NTF plots to pool on a somewhat reputable pool (in the end I donât know). But I donât have to trust the pool as much to guarantee my profits. I can put my trust in the chain as much as I would put my trust in the coin. I believe the official pooling protocol is here so that you can just farm on any pool without too many worries.
Thatâs correct! The new pooling protocol makes it a lot safer for farmers.
The effect of cheating pools is greatly reduced. Thats why people should re-plot. I canât understand why so many people are against re-plotting.
Probably because it wears out SSDs, costs energy and so onâŚ
Iâm very happy with foxypoolâs chia OG pool and the resulting revenue. Seems that this is one of the best OG pools that exist.
