Have you checked steemit´s daemon lately?
One Person with a bot-net or datacenter is trying to dominate steem-mining. If you look at the witness-list you will see a long queue of miners who are waiting in line to mine steem, and as you can see on the next picture, one person is pretty much dominating that queue.
If this was Bitcoin, a guy like this, would be a danger to the blockchain!
But this is steemit - these 19 #witnesses make sure everything is legit!
I personally think it is incredible that one person dominates the entire mining queue, but - he is not making any threat to the steem-chain - this blockchain is really designed by geniuses. On the Bitcoin Blockchain it is all about everybody getting blocks at the same time - like a flock of elephants crossing a narrow door at the same time.
I could go on and on and on about how much electricity that is wasted on miners mining bitcoins and not finding a block, or how bitcoin-miners are paying the power-bill to the powers that are - the power-plant-owners, but I will not bother.
All system works the way they are designed :)
He found an exploit in the system. There is a patch in the works and hopefully a hard fork to stop it soon. https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/256
I hope they fork his rewards out too.
no his rewards should not be forked out, the exploit is an error in the system, the person in question has merely highlighted a problem. If a cash machine is left open and you can take the cash, then that's the banks fault. If on a crypto-currency you can go around reversing transactions that don't suit, then you can lose a lot of credibility and potentially damage the acceptance of the system. If you are not seen to be completely decentralised then you will be superseded by one that is. Hence the imbalance in mining control in BTC is damaging it's long term viability. It's a weakness that other cryptos are exploiting and gaining traction through.
If the cash machine is left open and you take the cash you got directly to jail. It's theft.
yeah, but they are unlikely to find you if you were quick, most people would at least want to take it, and most people would think it was a lucky event and one to which was worth exploiting. But anyway, it wasn't the best comparison for me to make in relation to this issue (but my latter point stands). This isn't an illegal exploit, if indeed it is an exploit at all. The benefit of someone taking a high profile move against a system is that it gets more attention and we all become a little more aware as to how secure this system is, hopefully before we invest too much of our time and or money, it certainly makes me hold back somewhat more as far as Steemit is concerned, and that's probably not a bad thing.
If someone found exploit in system he should report to developers not exploit it in expense of all other legitimate miners.
in an ideal world, but people by and large do not, as in the DAO hack. That is seen by many as a legitimate exploit within the terms of the contract. I am not really saying I condone it, but these sort of things tend to get more attention and dealt with a lot more urgently when they get high profile attention and cause financial issues.
This hack is really a pain, i don't mine much. Now I can't mine at all.
Im not really sure why you think this is an exploit (versus some random guy with lot of votes and a lot of hash power)... this guy might just have gotten GPU mining to work or something, or just brought in a buttload of machines.
It does seem kind of weird that the miners in question keep changing their memo keys though. unlike many cryptos, miners don't get paid a ton here there might just not be that many people willing to invest in hardware to compete with him.
that said, id expect him to be slightly more subtle if he was a bad actor exploiting some kind of security hole, like not giving all his machines similar names.
Great post @fyrstikken. The post and replies are very helpful for non-technical people like myself. I always up vote this type of article. I think some technical type could do very well on Steemit answering questions of a technical nature. I'm thinking of not only questions pertaining to Steemit but would include questions relating to computers, browsers, platforms like openledger, bitshares etc. I see it something like the following: a question is posed and then the technical recipient comes back with his price required, quoted in Steam, Bitshares etc., to answer the question. Do any of you tech. types see this as a business opportunity?
Thanks for keeping these thing s int eh light.
I have an idea to fill some space on my blog. A steemit journal. Let me know what you think. https://steemit.com/steemit/@joelinux/8-11-16-2-00am-california-mildly-entertaining-journal-entry-1
Steem block chain is amazing. Mining it is by far one of the best. Good job devs. Tried mining it started it but desired not to mess with it. So bought instead :) steem me up Scotty.
@fyrstikken I found something similar, only looking at ALL steemit accounts:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@tyler-fletcher/i-found-someone-on-steemit-with-300-bots
This seems to be spreading like wildfire.
Insane, large investment right there. I wish they would have just drove the price of steem up instead.....
I was just checking and noticed the same thing. Amazon EC2 getting a payday! Interesting how they stay in perfect numeric order - likely running off of one script.
yeah as long as we have the witnesses, there is no need to fear :)