A few comments on this post:
First, Chris is investigating this particular case with juanfrand, and hopes to get back to him with more information in a day, after he's resolved the ten or so tickets higher up in the queue.
Second, the NiceHash situation is very complicated because of the legal issues involved. We are aware of a lot of information about this problem, and none of it has been shared publicly. There are a few reasons why we don't want to do that now:
- The people responsible may leave after we announce our findings, and we want to record as much data first for statistical analysis as possible so that this method has a near perfect detection record before most people abandon using it.
- There are legal issues with making statements unless we are sure that they are 100% true, and we are only 99% confident in some statements.
- NiceHash has ignored all attempts at communication so far, and we want to wait until it is long enough that they cannot excuse themselves by stating their ticket queue was backed up or they didn't receive the message.
- We determined that some other pools are much more vulnerable to this problem than we are. There is an ethical question about releasing the detection code because while we want to put an end to this problem because trolls from these pools have behaved unethically by posting bogus bugs and profitability metrics in the forums and ticket system. Releasing the code does good for the world by eliminating scammers, but may also be bad because the pools who have created troll accounts would be rewarded for their immoral behavior.
To clarify above, NiceHash does not have a 10% lower earnings rate than other pools. 10% of the rented hashrate has an earnings rate that is close to zero. Simply reducing all NiceHash earnings is not a viable option because then people who know which miners have the problem can pass the cost of the exploit off onto other customers.
One of the solutions may indeed be to prohibit usage by NiceHash. They are a continual source of problems because of their exploits, their rude customer service, and the inflexible design of their system. A stopgap measure might be to announce a temporary ban on NiceHash and see what effect that has.
