ETH Glitch?

CASHED MINE OUT WOOT xmas is here

mine had 21.575

Let's hope that when they have things back up its still there!!  Not likely though, and I hope we don't get reset to zero or something odd like that! About a month ago I watched my balance drop right before my eyes!  I never heard back on why that happened but I think it was an app view glitch.  No idea what my balance was before this new issue started.  Admin posted about maintenance to 0705 but I saw the 'glitches' at 0645 when I first jumped on my computer this morning.

I had to update my computer and now my ETH is 0.00000? I had 11.3919 ETH this morning, what happened? All my ETH disappeared...

Didn't computerguy69 move their 20+ ETH crypto to another wallet? Wasn't it a block reward? There are so many questions that I have and I feel like I am being cheated here. 

Even if they were lying, the fact still remains. Since everyone had different values in their crypto balance it makes it hard to think that it was just a "glitch". What happened to all of the cryptos and what happens if it was a block reward? My wallet will not be available until 5:41 pm EST, so I can't say for certain if I was able to transfer before the maintenance. But, it makes me feel that I have been shafted. :/

I am new to mining too. But, typically block rewards on ETH network work like this: 2 + 2 + 0.00342 + 0.09335 - 1.72 ETH ($11,332.98) is the reward per block. This is why mining in a pool is worth it. It isn't uncommon to receive multiple block rewards within the span of minutes too. So, if someone received 4 block rewards within 6 hours (the length of someone sleeping) it would be rare, but not impossible. so a 9000% increase in your account wouldn't be impossible. I just watched a youtube video where a guy had seen a guy get 2 block rewards in 16 minutes a total of 7.7 ETH, although this was back at the beginning of the year where ETH was significantly easier to mine, it doesn't discount the fact that these numbers were possibly block rewards. If the current block reward is $11,332.98 without fees, it makes sense for people to get these numbers. 

Arous, Wow, that just seems unreal!  It would make sense to me that a block reward would be divided up across the pool but not everyone getting the full amount.  Not saying you are lying, I'd just have to see it to believe it, and not while the miner is going nuts and restarting all the time like this morning.  Thanks for info, going to look more into it.

This happened to me as well, I noticed a large payout in my app, but couldn't access the wallet, then when maintenance was over everything was gone. What happened? Did the pool hit a large reward? Why did it display so much ETH, and where did it go? Took a picture of my screen to share. 

This is understandable and I didn't mean that any one person received the block reward, but for persons' potential share in the pool's reward to be ripped away after maintenance seems shady to say the least. I know that I don't have the best hash rate with only a max of 30 MH/s(~2.75$) and I haven't been running for so long for whatever reason(i.e. active GPU usage: gaming, video processing, etc.) But, the vast majority of my idle time should have been going to contribute to the pool. I keep my computer running 24/7 because ever since I started back in June/July I figured it would be a good way to get some extra cash to help with school and whatever. All, I am trying to get at is that this is frustrating. I don't mind paying fees because I know Norton has a reputation for security, but it feels that the share in the reward was taken after I updated my computer.

Can you explain why some of us received large payouts of ETH? It showed I had over 6 ETH before the maintenance update. What happened?

This is all interesting and still very confusing on many fronts.  I myself had 9.957854 ETH this morning when I took a snapshot at 0653.  Right before bed, about 10pm last night I had barely over 0.010; obviously a really big jump!  Seems from the posts that it is not verified that 1 person will get a big reward or is it spread out.  heck, if there is a reward spread out in the pool, how would we know?  Would there be a new payout line 'reward'?   Myself, other than this morning, I've not seen any jump other than about a month ago when my balance went up at a faster rate for about 2 hrs but then it reset and set me back about 12 hrs or so of mining; I watched that happen with my own eyes and the wallet confirmed it.  Now, on this mornings really big jump, the #'s we had on the App came from the server so that is suspect to me as well.  Where did those ETH come from and where did they go? We will never know, I'm sure.  I never found out why mine burped a month ago and I lost ground. Luckily I don't need the money, mining just for the heck of it.  If I do hit the ETH lotto reward for real (even 1-10% of what we thought we had), great, but I'm not holding my breath.  We'll have better luck if the price if ETH keeps going up.

Block rewards are sent to the mining "pool" owned by Norton, we pay out based on shares and amount contributed to the pool. This is how everyone in the pool is paid no matter what is happening with block rewards.

As to what happened, we had one of our systems go down and it caused some inaccurate information to be shown to users. The maintenance mode was set to correct the issue and get the services back up and running.

So Sad. It said I had 50,000$

I have mentioned numerous times on here that we need a log we can access in the app, would help with transparency and credibility.  From what I've seen and heard, our balances update every 10 minutes, of log of those transactions would be great!  We deserve to know what really happened, the system gave us those numbers in our app; why?  I'm wondering, now that I know about awards, if I had actually got one around Oct 7th (a fair jump in only 2 hrs) and then it was taken away then.  When that happened I actually lost ETH after the drop and never got it back.  Also, we never got any 'jump' (word used by Admin here) from the so called 'display' problem and dead mining time (mining w/ no increases) back around late Sept!  Not even counting the assumed lost reward, we've all lost  the potential for ETH during this endevour.  To add salt to the wound, I had another night of low rate increase; happens a fair amount.  Heck, I get better rates during the day even when I'm using the computer.  I'll be shutting mining down at the end of the day for a while, not sure if I'll start back up.  Maybe to get to 0.012, we'll see.

Mine had 42.106987. I'm usually between 115 and 105 MH/s running a 3090. It would be interesting to test the block reward theory based on amounts and avg. MH/s for a specific window of time. Since this is pooled are the distributions correlated with the MH/s for everyone within the pool? Additionally, it is unlikely we'll get any resolution from Norton on this as it's still a "beta" and their TOS is written such that they assume ZERO liability AND we have no recourse on any potential losses. A couple of interesting statements from the Norton crypto supplement document (attached).

"If the part your computer has completed is verified and therefore accepted, you are credited with what is commonly known in crypto-mining terms as a “share.” The shares have no value themselves; instead, they are used solely as a unit of measurement to calculate potential payouts of Ether. Again, these “shares” do not indicate that you own any type of equity or other rights in any real or virtual entity." 

So are we really just being distributed "shares?"

Next, "Rewards of crypto earned by the program, if any, are allocated to you based on the timing of your participation, the number of units you are credited through your contributions, and how much Ether is generated based on those units."

Looks like the lot of us were part of the timing of a large block reward, subsequently credited using Norton's systems, and then when Norton noticed the potential for huge payouts either 1) didn't have the assets to "payout" that reward 2) scrambled to collect as much as possible from the pool under the auspices of a "glitch," 3) shutdown any ability to withdraw (hence why none of our wallets were accessible) until they could move/pool the rewards into their own cold wallet. As a public company (Traded as NLOK on the NASDAQ) they will most certainly have to disclose their assets. However, I pulled their most recent 10-Q and there is no mention of Norton Crypto as a talking point. While they are not required to line-item list their assets on their filings, it would be interesting to see how they would classify such a windfall if indeed this was a block reward and not a glitch. Here's a link to their most recent 10-Q: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/849399/00008493992100002...

This is most annoying part and I'm not sure how it would hold up to legal scrutiny, but being an unregulated market here in the US it is unlikely to get an positive support. " We do not know how much Ether, if any, will be produced or distributed by the program, and both will fluctuate over time depending on the results of the program. You may receive only small amounts of crypto or no crypto at all; We do not guarantee that any participant will receive any crypto at all or any particular amount of crypto." That being said, if it was stolen....might be a different story. Anyone know a good class action attorney?

I'll also mention, after the "glitch." I tried mining for the better part of the next and my ETH balance has not changed. So, payouts are NOT happening periodically despite my 3090 running for 20 hours at around 105 MH/s. 

This is a relatively interesting product. I am not creating this post to bash or shame Norton for trying something new, but if someone thought this would not get people interested in Crypto mining simply because they are consumers they were wrong. Don't get me wrong, I am definitely curious about what happened to the "glitch". I am skeptical about what happened, but that isn't the main focus of this post. Instead, I am going to give away free information: If mining with Norton is profitable and is it worth giving up your GPU to Norton on a Pay Per Share basis.

Firstly, I am going to give you the low-down. It is going to be definitions and acronyms, for your information(FYI) and a small history lesson. Ethereum(ETH) is the second-largest cryptocurrency as of currently. ETH was "born" from BitCoin(BTC). It was described initially by Vitalik Buterin in 2013 inside an issue of BitCoin Magazine with the goal of decentralized applications(Dapps). I like to say, the first documented thought to de-ghettoizing the internet. I don't mean that in any offensive manner. I simply mean an isolated or segregated area of the net that people group in. Think of how everyone you know has either FB, Twitter, Netflix, Hulu or Insta, etc. If they don't, then they probably don't exist. The Ethereum Network or Ethereum Blockchain is the infrastructure for running these Dapps and it is not the currency, it is a platform. The Ethereum Network allows people to connect directly to applications without a central authority. 

Blockchain Technology(BT or Blockchain) is an amalgamation of Peer-to-Peer networking(P2P), Proof-of-Work(PoW) and in some cases Proof-of-Stake(PoS) with cryptography, crypto as the cool-kids call it. The Blockchain can reach a consensus without a central authority. If you want to learn more about Blockchain I recommend reading "Blockchain Revolution" by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott. I liked the book. Blockchain is cool. The Ethereum Network uses Smart Contracts. These contracts are self-executing, letter strict, and immutable. The Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) allowed users to deposit money and get returns based on investments the DAO made. DAO was exploited in 2016 which forced a hard fork creating Ethereum Classic(ETC) and Ethereum(ETH). When the layperson talks about Ethereum, they mean Ether and not the network itself. It is an abuse of notation, but laymen lay. For an author to publish something to the Ethereum Network, that author has to pay to do so. This payment is made in Ether. This includes transactions and transaction fees and anything else published to the Blockchain. Ether, this is the ETH and this is what you are paid in when you "mine" or run the Ethereum Protocol on your computer either with the Norton Crypto pool or with another mining pool. All GAS! No, not the stuff you pass. But, you might be passing on this. Gas is the fee required to conduct a successful transaction or execute a Smart Contract on the Ethereum Network. It is a small fraction of ETH and is measured in GWEI. It is sometimes referred to as nano or nanoether. Without Gas, the Ethereum Blockchain wouldn't be able to go anywhere. Lol. Pretty simple stuff, right?

Now, time for the fun stuff. Math. I am going to talk about a "peer-reviewed" white paper from The Arxiv (pronounced archive) from 2011. Specifically, I am going to be referencing "Analysis of Bitcoin Pooled Mining Reward Systems" [0] written by Meni Rosenfeld published on December 22, 2011.

Disclaimer: The math could be different, I am assuming it is true for any network of several miners since both BTC and ETH use Proof-of-Work as the basis for payout. 

In Meni's paper, "A mining pool is defined as a joint effort between several miners to work on finding blocks together, and split the rewards among the participants in proportion to their contribution."

Let H be the total hash rate of all miners, then the pool will find on average (H * t)/(2**32 * D) blocks over time t of network difficulty D. The "**" just means "to the power of". I could use the caret( ^ ), but I python. From what I can tell, 1/(2**32 * D) is chosen so "that every computed hash will lead to a valid block with this probability." Meni then goes on to describe the total average reward as B * ( (H * t)/(2**32 * D)), where B is the block reward, how a single miner contributes to the hash rate as some percentage of H, let's call it h, their variance of the total reward and potential benefit of being in a pool. "The potential benefit is, therefore, greater the smaller the miner and the larger the pool."

In the next paragraph, he describes how a pool operator collects fees as a fixed percentage cut, f, of the block reward. "The operator will receive a fee of (f * B) and the remaining (1 - f) * B is distributed among the miners. Subsequently, Meni does some extra algebra for us and get: ((1-f) * B) * ( (h * t)/(2**32 * D)). He makes an assumption that every share has a probability of p = 1/D to be a valid block and describes the expected payout as pB. Next, Meni suggests that in a fair pool that a miner should receive on average (1 - f) * pB taking into account the operator fees. 

"It turns out that deciding how to divide the rewards, so that each miner will be paid his fair share in proportion to his work, is not a trivial problem" - Meni Rosenfeld.

I am not a genius, I just stumbled upon this arxiv paper yesterday after the "glitch" and I wanted to know how difficult it is to properly divide the rewards up. I am not saying I deserved what showed up in my balance from the "glitch" because I have no way to determine if my hash rate is statistically significant since the total network hash rate remains unpublished. Is there any way to get this information? Is Norton crypto a truly fair pool?

There are two types of simple reward systems. Proportional and Pay Per-Share. It has been noted that Norton Crypto uses a Pay Per Share(PPS) model. So, I won't talk about Proportional. PPS the operator gets to keep all the rewards for found blocks and when a participant in the pool submits a share they are immediately rewarded with (1 - f) * p * B, their expected payout.

"If the operator doesn't correctly balance the pool's fee with their financial reserves the pool has a good chance to eventually go bankrupt." - Meni Rosenfeld.

<Plug and Chug Section>

Assume a 15% operator fee, current network difficulty 10803 terahash (We will round to 10.803 [1] petahash) and we assume that solutions submitted are roughly equal to the users hash rate. 

Total Expected Payout of Norton Crypto Pool w/o fees =  (1/10.803 petahash) * (2 + 2.47 + 0.00366 + 0.1004 - 2.2) [2]ETH = 0.21976 ETH / petahash
Total Expected Payout of Norton Crypto Pool w/ operator fee =  (1 - 0.15) * (1/10.803 petahash) * (2 + 2.47 + 0.00366 + 0.1004 - 2.2)ETH = 0.186795 ETH / petahash
Total Expected Payout of Norton Crypto Pool w/ operator fee and 0.000003% of 1 petahash =  3e-8 * (1 - 0.15) * (1/10.803 petahash) * (2 + 2.47 + 0.00366 + 0.1004 - 2.2)ETH = 5.604e-9 ETH / 0.000003% of a petahash

0.000003% of a petahash is 30 Megahash. I choose this number because my GPU was benchmarked here. It turns out to be 24hr yields approx. 2.27$ I am not accounting for latency which will cause variations in my daily return and other factors that could diminish my return, but when I see $0.67 as my Per Day return and my hash rate not being what it should be it makes me wonder if the product is stable and should it even be used. On coinwarz [3], I should be coming out with approx. 1.82$ profit per 24 hours factoring in my electricity.

</End of Plug and Chug>

Now, with all this said. I feel that the profitability of the Norton Crypto pool is the least of my worries. Since, Norton Crypto takes on the majority of the variance and risk it is their responsibility to take the reward. The PPS system that Norton has chosen seems irresponsible and the bugs are apparently so frequent every month or so. These bugs are more likely to cause emotional and financial harm than mining in another pool with PPLNS or PPS+. A Lack of transparency [4] on pool hash rates and other information you can find on other pools makes me hesitant to believe that this product is in the best interest of any consumer.

If I didn't explain something correctly, please let me know. Below in the comments or if you would like more information please don't be shy and ask. I would like to improve this product.

Here are the Resources that I used in this short write-up(?):

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.4980.pdf [0]
https://2miners.com/eth-network-difficulty [1]
https://bitinfocharts.com/ethereum/ [2]
https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/ethereum/calculator [3]
https://www.poolwatch.io/coin/ethereum [4]

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https://ethstats.net/
https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_average_gas_price

That's all well and good Matt, and yes it does clarify a bit. If this is the official position of the company, then at a minimum, corporate communications should issue a press release disclosing the issue, the remedies that Norton Crypto took to fix the issue, and offer a third party review/audit to verify. That's just good business sense especially if the intent is to continue to scale this new feature. 

What about the folks that where able to withdraw the large amount of ETH from there wallets? If they were able to withdraw than that mean it was a legit reward from the mining pool.