Did anyone else see a massive amount of ETH in their miner early morning (before maintenance). Mine said I had 9.5 ETH o_o
Diyo - it’s an obvious lie on the user part they were doing maintenance and told everyone they were unable to withdraw.
@Matt
"Sorry, it's so hard to read "tone" or "tongue and cheek" in forum posts 
"
That is too true my friend. Just know that when it comes to me, I function at an almost Vulcan level when it comes to logical reasoning. But unlike a Vulcan, I have a humorous side.
Yeah, the gas prices have been high for a while now. I just wish GPU prices would drop. My custom mining rig has slots I need to fill. Winter is coming on and I would much rather generate heat with mining GPUs than my home furnace. This is called "Environmentally friendly energy dual repurposing". The old-timers called it, "Killing two birds with one stone." 
There where one or two folks I think that where able to withdraw. If it was an error than it would have prevent those users from withdrawing. But since they were able to withdraw than it looks like it was a legit. Maybe they are lying who knows.....
Drop it people, it’s over. It was obviously a visual glitch and I’m surprised this thread is still open. I am gratefully I can still mine (especially with the high prices currently).
Sorry, it's so hard to read "tone" or "tongue and cheek" in forum posts 
Glad to see someone who understands what happened.
Now that we have resolved that issue, it would be nice if the gas prices would drop so things would be better for everyone.
Matt
Dude, I know that. My post was tongue and cheek man. I thought the glitch was hilarious and knew it was a glitch the instant I saw it. It was just too funny not to take a picture of. On the other hand, my wife was like, "Deposit that money in the bank RIGHT NOW!" I laughed at her. I said, "So, you want me to steal almost a quarter-million dollars from Norton, who is one of the top internet security companies in the world and knows EXACTLY who I am. REALLY? You think that is a good IDEA!" " She was like, "Well, it could be legitimate." I was like, "NO, It is NOT! it is just a glitch and Norton will fix it shortly, but I am gonna take a picture of it just to post on the Notron Crypto forum for kicks. ROFL!
While the screen shot is legit, the details it's showing are not. For the card he has at 27MH it would take 131k days to earn that kind of money (360 years). I have described the issue more than once in more than 1 thread. There was no massive ETH win. There was a legitimate error which was corrected within 2 hrs and things were back online. The wallet value shown above was correct at all times, it was the "payout calculation" that failed based on the service being down.
1000% guy is lying. The proof of work would have alerted someone that tokens that weren’t earned went into the wrong wallet. While a simple glitch on Nortons software would be amazing and we would all celebrate - its simply a glitch and the reason why crypto is so expensive is stuff like this doesn’t just happen and someone loses 12 ETH and someone just gains it. It would be a system worth nothing.
But this is another reason Norton needs to focus on security and STOP with the crypto gimmick. Put these developers back into security and patching. WHAT. THE. HELL.
Prepare the tar and feathers! People! To the town square I say! I demand justice!!!
Yes! I woke up to find that I was the new owner of 48 complete ETH coins worth $230K. WOOHOO!!!!! I took a shot of the screen with my phone as proof.
The website was not down, one of the backend services that calculates payouts and how many shares you have contributed was down. The portal in this case was getting incorrect information on errors and doing a calculation on that. Again you are not paid on block wins but amount of shares you contribute. There is no way to get a massive win for individual miners, it doesn't work that way. The mining pool may earn a bunch of block wins (or not) but there is an algorithm that uses the current difficulty level to determine share payouts.
If a service is down, shouldnt the mining return “no information” instead of “incorrect information.” Like when a website crashes, the load page says “err_connection_timed out” or “404.” It doesnt display an “incorrect” website. Also, if a server does go down, how does it display different incorrect values for many of us instead of returning the same error? For all we know, we couldve gotten those massive ETH shares first which then resulted in the server going down and stopped our mining instead of “server went down therefore we got incorrect numbers.”
When the service was down it was showing incorrect information so I don’t know how anyone would have withdrawn what was not there.
Remember we are paying per share not on block wins. As I have noted in other posts block wins are not directly shared. All miners in the pool are paid no matter if there are wins or not.
Appreciate the response Matt. Makes sense.
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.
When a server (service) is down we don't issue press releases. There was a memory leak in the code and the service crashed and didn't restart. We had to manually restart it. When the service was down, all mining stopped in our pool. People were not able to submit shares and the miners would stop working as they couldn't connect to the service (it was down).
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.
This is a great summary Arous. Thanks for breaking it all down. This particular line, "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" is precisely what I was suggesting in my post.
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