linas
commented
3 years ago OK, so I measured share submissions and payouts to three pools; one pool which blocked the scammer just a few days ago, and two which have not (yet). I submitted shares for 2-3 days, from small hash-power machines (so that it would average out). Here are the results.
First, the baseline: QRL block difficulties are variable; from 29 December 2020 to 1 Jan 2021, the difficulties and payouts low, high were:
difficulty reward QRL/hash date
737988332 5.3342 7.228e-9 11AM 1 Jan
938979454 5.3361 5.683e-9 10PM 30 DecThus, a miner operating over these days might expect rewards in this range. Here are the actual results:
start date end date submitted balance QRL/Hash Pool
30 Dec 17:00 1 Jan 17:00 120512453 0.5265 4.369e-9 miningocean.org
30 Dec 04:00 31 Dec 19:00 193467739 1.0224 5.285e-9 herominers.com
28 Dec 04:00 30 Dec 16:00 413303777 1.6050 3.883e-9 pool2mine pre-ban
30 Dec 22:00 1 Jan 16:00 132890290 0.8399 6.320e-9 pool2mine post-banThis shows the timer interval over which I mined, the hashes submitted, the rewards collected, and the average reward per hash. Times are in GMT, rounded to the hour. All three pools are seeing spiking behavior (actually, eight pools are, more about that below). I alerted the pool2mine operator, who blocked the spiker. Thus, for pool2mine, I can show pre-ban and post-ban rewards. Post-ban, the rewards are within the expected range. More-or-less on-the-button. Pre-ban rewards were a disaster. The other two pools are paying out at well below the expected value.
Again, with the spiking:
- pool2mine is the smallest pool, with a base rate of about 80 KH/sec. They were seeing spikes around 2-4 MH/sec every 3-6 hours.
- miningocean.org has a base rate of 700 to 800 KH/sec; they see spikes of 20MH/sec to 50 MH/sec. Note that the base hash rate for the entire QRL network is 14MH/sec, so these spikes are 2x to 4x grand total network rate.
- herominers.com has a base rate of 1.7MH/sec and sees spikes up to 25MH/sec
Of the three, herminers is the biggest pool, and is thus the hardest to spike, and thus pays out the best rewards (although significantly less than expected). miningocean is getting hit worse. pool2mine was getting crushed, before the ban.
Here is what "spiking" looks like:
Note the orange graph upper left. The biggest visible spike has a label: 1/1/2021 5:50:49 PM Pool hashrate: 26.36 MH/sec
fm407
muscleman
xmrminers
There appears to be reasonable evidence that someone has figured out how to confuse the calculation of shares for (an older version) of this pool software. It appears to affect at least ~two~ eight different pools. It's a doozey. Here we go.
An earlier version of this bug is reported here: tevador/RandomX#200 because I mistakenly assumed this was a RandomX weakness; it almost surely is not, its a pool weakness. To recap:
QRL, the "Quantum Resistant Ledger" uses RandomX. It's a small coin, about 14 MH/sec grand total network hashrate. Pool2mine is a small pool for QRL, about 84KH/sec. So, about 3x or 4x per day, someone joins this pool, mines at a rate of 2-5MH/sec for 2-5 minutes, and then leaves. When they mine, they pick up almost every block, and every block they pick up has a difficulty of 1% to 50%.
At first I thought: "a hah, someone is guessing the easy blocks and sucking them up". Nope. What I now think is happening is that someone is aiming a firehose of shares: about 100x more than what this pool normally sees, and approx 1/3rd of the total network hash-rate, and is tangling up the share calculator to credit them with more than they actually shared. (I mean, if this was a RandomX weakness, they would just solo-mine, instead of attaching to a pool.) This miner is probably a regular Monero miner (Monero has a network hash rate of 1.5GH/sec, so a 3MH/sec miner is not that big. But for QRL, 3MH/sec is huge.)
For Pool2mine you can see evidence for this as follows. Here's some recent activity:
So -- 27 December is a good example. This miner shows up at the indicated time, with maybe 5MH/sec(? approx?) hash power (this is maybe(?) 1/3rd(?) of total hash power for this coin), then, starting with block 1322615 they mined almost every block in a row, every 5 to 30 seconds, and then they leave about 7 minutes later. The network rate is supposed to be one block per minute.
You can view the above at the Pool Blocks page. The hash rate spikes are visible at the Dashboard. Note that the spikes there are are the hash-rate averaged over half an hour; the instantaneous rate is much higher. The miner is Q010300...91977ef and is visible in the top ten charts
So, how much is being lost? Here's my experiment:
If this is an old bug or a known bug, let me know. pool2mine seems to be running a Feb 11 2020 version of this s/w. No clue what version miningocean is using.