What is pool hopping and ip banning?

[DrStein99]

I do not know what pool hopping is or what happens for me to get ip-ban, or even know if I am banned. Can someone help me understand?

I know, that I connect to a pool, either knife-ass or otherwise in cryptonight/monero and it sits there for 5+ minutes with "NEW BLOCK" without any accepts, I am just suspicious or impatient. Sometimes 15 minutes go by and I do not see "ACCEPT". If I do not see any results in a reasonable time, I try other pools - and sometimes it works. I know my hardware works since it can fully function when I connect internally to my proxy, and other known xmr/monero pool. Does knife-ass run out of blocks to give out? I do not know.

I can not tell if the difficulty is too high for BOTH of my 2X xeon 2760's, or what is going on. I know sometimes I have to disconnect, make a change and re-start many times at first to get it right. Does this trigger a "pool hopping" thing in the pool to ban my ip? If I am banned - will it just not allow me to connect, or will it allow me to connect and just deal-out known bad blocks that won't ever be accepted with anything less then 3k h/s ?

 

[funkywizard]

Pool hopping is something people do to get an advantage over other miners.

Basically, for PPS (pay per share) pools, the early shares are worth more than the later shares. So if you wait until a pool has found a new block, then you join the pool, mine a little bit, and then move on to another pool that has "a young block to work on", you can make more money.

Presumably, some pools attempt to detect this behavior, and ban users. I've even seen one pool with an integrated chat, where they called out someone for pool hopping, and "thanked" them for "donating" their shares to everyone else -- i.e. they deleted their credit for mining.

As to not getting valid shares for an extended period -- check the pool difficulty. If the difficulty is 100,000, and your computer can do 1,000 h/s, you would expect to submit a share roughly once every 100 seconds (give or take). This is normal. If you want a lower difficulty setting, some pools have different ports for that.

 

[DrStein99]

Ok thanks.