This has been known since the very beginning, even as the reference pool was being developed. One mitigation in the ref pool is that there is a cooldown period for updating diff, so you can’t effectively submit each and every partial at its difficulty, only some. In fact what the reference pool does is it defers the update for 10 minutes, so your adjustment comes way too late to benefit from it.
In any case, the best way to fix this is to have a better difficulty adjustment algorithm so that you don’t really need the farmer to give you hints.
Turns out that I was right and some of the mentioned pools are starting to recognize their wrongdoings.
MaxioPool is already closed and now Ecochia has officially recognized that they exaggerated their reported netspace to attract more farmers. Yesterday Ecochia netspace suddenly dropped from ~180PiB to ~45PiB
Given the unethical behaviour of the pool Chia Network has revoked Ecochia’s trademark grant.
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Maxio never said they lied about pool size. Why would anyone bother? It literally doesn’t matter if a pool wins blocks once a hour or once a week, it has no impact on profitability. There would be no advantage whatsoever but would make them vulnerable to legal action (edit: and as pointed out below, would also make them look less profitable)
What they did do, what I’m pissed about, is that they shut down (which is fine) while blaming a widely understood and specifically designed for attack on the entire concept of pps pools (not fine) and failed to redeem partial balances (not fine but tiny). Chia already addresses that “attack” with the farmer block signing and 1/8 direct reward to avoid the category of problem. But they made it sound like there was some kind of new vulnerability in the actual chia code, when really they just had no idea how pooling protocols work, and my working theory is it was all a scam by Bitcoin bros to generate FUD about chia.
I wonder if their farmers will stay with them. That is a very big lie. Pools that cheat should be shut down by the Chia Network. But that is perhaps impossible?
Almost half of the mid to large pools are lying about size or are way off. Can’t get them all. Here the Chia Network took action as this pool got a license to use the name from them.
Nowadays, lying about the pool size will only lose members, not gain them. There are sites that show the profitability of the pools and that calculation uses the pools reported size. If they pad the size, the profit number goes down. The profit number is low for the pool, people will move to a more profitable pool.
It will all balance out. The honest pools will prevail. It just takes time.
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