DAO soft fork voting on Ethpool & Ethermine

dr_pradr_pra Member Posts: 445 ✭✭✭
During the last days we have received lots of questions on our point of view regarding the proposed soft fork in order to freeze the funds that were taken from the DAO contract by the means of exploiting a bug in the contract code. If you follow this forum as well as the various Ethereum subreddits you will quickly realize that a heated debate is currently going on if a potential soft- (and maybe later a hard-) fork is a viable solution for this incident.

As the admin of Ethpool and Ethermine I believe that the pool should take into account the various opinions of our customers - the miners - before making any decision in this regard. As it is very difficult to derive such an opinion from post written on this forum as well as on reddit we have decided to let the actual miners on both pools to vote on this issue.

Each miner that is actively mining on the pool (= has submitted valid shares during the last hour) can cast their vote using the account settings tab in his account page. Currently there are 4 different options:
  • Not voted
  • Don't care
  • Yes, run the soft fork
  • No, do not run the soft fork
The current result of the voting process is available at http://ethpool.org/stats/votes and http://ethermine.org/stats/votes. All votes are weighted by the hashrate of each miner that has voted.

The voting process will end a few days before the freeze period of the Child-DAO, which currently holds the funds extracted from the DAO, or earlier if a clear majority has been formed. We commit to follow the decision of our miners according to the result of the voting process. We will reserve the right to act against the voting results if a larger portion of the network starts to mine on a different chain (e.g. ethpool & ethermine vote yes on the soft fork, but the remaining network does not support it). This is solely for the purpose to avoid mining on top of invalid blocks which would reduce the mining earning of the whole pool.

A potential hard for is currently not included in the voting as there is not even a clear proposal on the table.

As this is the first time we are casting such a vote we are open to any feedback how we can improve this process.

Thanks & happy mining!
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Comments

  • dlehenkydlehenky Member Posts: 2,249 ✭✭✭✭
    @dr_pra Thank you very much for taking our votes on this issue! Is there any safeguards in place to prevent someone from voting multiple times? One could easily run on ethermine for a couple hours, vote, and then switch to ethpool for a couple hours and vote again, change wallet addresses and repeat. Are you requiring a unique valid public IP address and matching wallet address?
  • dr_pradr_pra Member Posts: 445 ✭✭✭
    edited June 2016
    As soon a miner stops mining on the pool his vote is not longer taken into account. This mechanism makes such a tactic useless.

    Edit: To make the result better visible we have excluded miners that have not voted yet. Their hashrate is shown in the subtitle of the chart as reference.
    Post edited by dr_pra on
  • ethfanethfan Member Posts: 458 ✭✭✭
    If I change my decision after voting, is it possible to re-vote?
  • BiodomBiodom Member Posts: 693 ✭✭✭
    edited June 2016
    @dr_pra

    Why do I need to provide my IP address to vote?
    can you go with something else, like recent payment (first 6 digits or more, if needed)?
    I am sure that this (IP) will suppress the voting numbers.
    As current DAO hack has shown, everything is hackable.
  • DiveDeeperDiveDeeper Member Posts: 6
    @Biodom the IP address is being used to verify your identity, which means that your IP is already being stored on the pool servers anyway. And if you've noticed, the first 3 bytes of your IP are censored, meaning no one else will be able to see it.
  • dr_pradr_pra Member Posts: 445 ✭✭✭
    edited June 2016
    @ethfan yes re-voting is possible.

    @Biodom the IP address is the simplest way to verify the identity of a worker. The recent payment id can be looked up using a block explorer. The most secure alternative would be to ask the miner to sign a message with his Ethereum account but a lot of miners use addresses from an exchange which would exclude them from the voting. Dwarfpool uses the same method the verify the identity of a miner. We had the mechanism already in place for defining different account settings, we just added the voting field.
  • BiodomBiodom Member Posts: 693 ✭✭✭
    edited June 2016
    @dr_pra @DiveDeeper
    I am not concerned about pool knowing my address since pool knows it already, but someone hacking the relevant web page to extract web addresses of participants.

    If you are going to strip IP addresses from the aggregated results and only use IP to validate, then it might be OK. You really need to explain the procedure better.
  • dr_pradr_pra Member Posts: 445 ✭✭✭
    Only the last byte of the IP is transferred to the client, not the full IP.
  • BiodomBiodom Member Posts: 693 ✭✭✭
    @dr_pra

    OK, thanks, this is fine, then.
  • PlanetETHPlanetETH Member Posts: 13
    dr_pra said:


    Each miner that is actively mining on the pool (= has submitted valid shares during the last hour) can cast their vote using the account settings tab in his account page. Currently there are 4 different options:

    • Not voted
    • Don't care
    • Yes, run the soft fork
    • No, do not run the soft fork
    just to clarify, do i need to be mining on your pool at least an hour before your post to be able to vote, or can i join the pool now and vote after an hour?
    Thanks.


  • dr_pradr_pra Member Posts: 445 ✭✭✭
    You can join and vote at any time. But if you leave the pool your vote will time out after 1h and will not be counted any more.
  • minerkinminerkin Member Posts: 41
    How do I find the public ip address of my miner?
  • yurtaevyurtaev Member Posts: 1
    edited June 2016
    @dr_pra
    "The voting process will end a few days before the freeze period of the Child-DAO", but what if other attacks on the DAO would be committed before that deadline?
  • minerkinminerkin Member Posts: 41
    edited June 2016
    I did punch in the public ip of my WAN as per the link but it says ip invalid.

    EDIT: It worked on second attempt.
  • joeventurajoeventura Member Posts: 1
    Pay the hacker $1m as a bug finding bounty in exchange for releasing what will soon be valueless ETH and save us all the trouble. https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4ot6vi/pay_the_dao_hacker_1_million_dollars/
  • dr_pradr_pra Member Posts: 445 ✭✭✭
    @joeventura please keep the discussion on topic. This thread is about the voting by miners on the planned soft fork and should not be used to elaborate the different available options in general.
  • SmokyishSmokyish Member Posts: 203 ✭✭
    dr_pra said:


    As this is the first time we are casting such a vote we are open to any feedback how we can improve this process.

    You should propably add some sort of notification on the miner account page, as there is a big chance that not many of the miners follow this forum.

    Like a notification box under the "Account: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" text.
    People don't check or change their settings that often either so will very likely miss this change there.

    Also i would highly recommend adding a link to this thread besides the ethereum blog entry, as your post gives out more info about what this vote is about as well and how it will affect the pool. This will also likely raise a number of questions for miners, and thus a link to this thread would also serve for that purpose.

    You could also add information somewhere, as to where will you be giving out additional info, ie. regarding the hard-fork if that plan goes forward etc. I stumbled upon this thread because i was looking for this info, on how your pool is going to handle this situation, but this isn't the first place people are going to go for this information and you don't really have a clear and well known forum/medium on where you share info regarding the pool, like twitter, this forum or something. So these could be some measures as to how to communicate this vote and change to your users.

  • dr_pradr_pra Member Posts: 445 ✭✭✭
    Since day one all relevant information regarding the pools were announced in this forum. Also we created a thread on Reddit which is currently on the front page of the Ethereum sub.

    But you are right we will add a link from the pool to this thread.
  • etherninjaetherninja Member Posts: 24
    Pay the hacker nothing.
  • SmokyishSmokyish Member Posts: 203 ✭✭
    dr_pra said:

    Since day one all relevant information regarding the pools were announced in this forum. Also we created a thread on Reddit which is currently on the front page of the Ethereum sub.

    But you are right we will add a link from the pool to this thread.

    Thanks! :)

    Here's a question: Will there be any down-time on the pool if the soft- and/or hard-fork is implemented?
  • GenoilGenoil 0xeb9310b185455f863f526dab3d245809f6854b4dMember Posts: 769 ✭✭✭
    @dr_pra why don't you - once the software is ready - set up 2 new pools at fork.ethpool.org and fork.ethermine.org and let hashpower decide. If the majority of pools does this, everything will be fine.
  • EtheringEthering Member Posts: 19
    Doesn't doing the fork create MASSIVE value in Ethereum by showing the world that Ethereum can save itself from a massive MtGox headline news event? Bitcoin couldn't do anything, the Ethereum miners can and that means huge increased value to ETH and the future volume of ETH transactions.

    Otherwise the world sees yet another blockchain solution that was supposed to be "better" as being no different. Ethereum is different, lets do the forks.
  • dr_pradr_pra Member Posts: 445 ✭✭✭
    @Smokyish there will be no downtime required to implement the fork logic

    @Genoil this is certainly an option but it will require us to nearly double the servers required to run the pool. Each mining node is running on its own dedicated server for optimal performance. Also it will require for each miner to make an proactive swtich on their rigs if they want to vote for the fork which can be quite time consuming for them.
  • dlehenkydlehenky Member Posts: 2,249 ✭✭✭✭
    Genoil said:

    @dr_pra why don't you - once the software is ready - set up 2 new pools at fork.ethpool.org and fork.ethermine.org and let hashpower decide. If the majority of pools does this, everything will be fine.

    That would require every miner to change their miner command line parameter for the pool, or edit eth-proxy.conf, and restart the miners. You can bet that some miners won't even know they need to do this. What happens to hash that doesn't make any change at all? Do you have a default fork URL that the regular pool URL goes to? It seems as though the vote would be much less disruptive. Either way (vote vs new URLs) seems to work, so ...
  • Marvell9Marvell9 Member Posts: 593 ✭✭✭
    dr_pra said:

    During the last days we have received lots of questions on our point of view regarding the proposed soft fork in order to freeze the funds that were taken from the DAO contract by the means of exploiting a bug in the contract code. If you follow this forum as well as the various Ethereum subreddits you will quickly realize that a heated debate is currently going on if a potential soft- (and maybe later a hard-) fork is a viable solution for this incident.

    As the admin of Ethpool and Ethermine I believe that the pool should take into account the various opinions of our customers - the miners - before making any decision in this regard. As it is very difficult to derive such an opinion from post written on this forum as well as on reddit we have decided to let the actual miners on both pools to vote on this issue.

    Each miner that is actively mining on the pool (= has submitted valid shares during the last hour) can cast their vote using the account settings tab in his account page. Currently there are 4 different options:

    • Not voted
    • Don't care
    • Yes, run the soft fork
    • No, do not run the soft fork
    The current result of the voting process is available at http://ethpool.org/stats/votes and http://ethermine.org/stats/votes. All votes are weighted by the hashrate of each miner that has voted.

    The voting process will end a few days before the freeze period of the Child-DAO, which currently holds the funds extracted from the DAO, or earlier if a clear majority has been formed. We commit to follow the decision of our miners according to the result of the voting process. We will reserve the right to act against the voting results if a larger portion of the network starts to mine on a different chain (e.g. ethpool & ethermine vote yes on the soft fork, but the remaining network does not support it). This is solely for the purpose to avoid mining on top of invalid blocks which would reduce the mining earning of the whole pool.

    A potential hard for is currently not included in the voting as there is not even a clear proposal on the table.

    As this is the first time we are casting such a vote we are open to any feedback how we can improve this process.

    Thanks & happy mining!
    Looks like soft fork is winning handily , BTW what about the hard fork i hope you wont have to do a new pol for that because the hard fork to return the DAO coins will be the next step.
  • GenoilGenoil 0xeb9310b185455f863f526dab3d245809f6854b4dMember Posts: 769 ✭✭✭
    dr_pra said:

    @Smokyish there will be no downtime required to implement the fork logic

    @Genoil this is certainly an option but it will require us to nearly double the servers required to run the pool. Each mining node is running on its own dedicated server for optimal performance. Also it will require for each miner to make an proactive swtich on their rigs if they want to vote for the fork which can be quite time consuming for them.

    If pools didn't exist, the pro-fork miners would also have to actively switch while no-fork miners would just mine on. May the 51% win :smile: .

    Anyway good point on the servers, that shouldn't be on your shoulders.
  • robinminerrobinminer ParisMember Posts: 38
    @dr_pra Thanks for acting fast and help making the Ethereum community fair and democratic. It was great to have the possibility to vote!
  • bardacudabardacuda Member Posts: 14
    Does this soft fork freeze all DAO funds that use the slock.it DAO's framework, or only "The DAO" and its child DAOs in particular? It's my understanding that there are other DAOs that could be affected by this fork, so I would just like to clarify what this does exactly, and if the owners of any unrelated DAOs would be affected and/or compensated first.
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