Grin Pool Centralization Over 80%

By this time, the largest Grin mining pool was GoblinPool.
The founder of the pool Xiao Jay is the creator of the Niffler wallet.
Since most of the miners are in China, over 80% hashrate was on the Goblin Pool so far.
It was a big problem but everyone ignored it. Xiao Jay tried to prevent this by increasing the pool commission to 2.5%, but was unsuccessful.
Now, Goblin Pool is closing due to legal regulations in China.
And we are moving towards centralization again.
Because, in the last 12 hours, miners started redirecting to the always.vip pool, which has another Chinese server.
No miners are switching to grinmint or 2miners.
Source: Grin (GRIN) Cuckatoo32 | Mining Pools

Miners should know that they are making this coin dangerous, which they earn money.
You should know that if grin has 51% attack, all your mining devices, all your dreams will be rubbish.
Even if the pool creator won’t do it, someone can do who hacking access to the pool server.

So now we have to resolve this issue.
Dividing miners as 33%-33%-33% into always.vip, grinmint and 2miners is currently the most useful solution.
This three pools have Asia server.
Always.vip and 2miners have 1% commission. Grinmint has %2.5 comission.
It would be fair for Grinmint to switch to 1% commission for decentralization.
I recommend that all pool founders hold a meeting and for this, the three pool founders can post a joint statement on the pool homepage.
@mcm-mike @xiaojay @tromp @david @davidtavarez

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This sounds good. I also recommend a short compilation of the URLs and ports since all of them offer servers in Asia:

always.vip

2miners

grinmint

herominers
herominers

woolypooly
woolypooly

We could use the CC github repo to post a short document about it. I will start writing this now.

I’m not sure about reducing the comission. I undertand the point, however this will depend on what is best for each pool, last time we checked, costs were a bit high.

These are the current mining fee % for grin (12.10.2021)

|Pool url|Pool fee|
| — | — | — |
|goblinpool.com|2.5 %|
|always.vip|1 %|
|2miners|1 %|
|2miners-Solo|1.5 %|
|grinmint.com|2.5 %|
|herominers.com|0.9 %|
|woolypooly.com|0.9 %|

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one of the problem which is concerned by chinese miner is pool should provide option to withdrawl grin to gate.io directly.

Because tor is forbidden in china, so it is hard for chinese user to deposit grin to gate.io, which is the biggest grin exchange.

so chinese miner is like to withdraw grin to gate derectly by pool.

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Yes, centralization is bad. I have notice this, I consider imporving pool fee, but goblin has prove it didn’t work.

So, always.vip will not accept new miners.

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by this you mean, let the miner to set the “memo”? which is not possible by using grinmint for example, correct?

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Yes, now only always.vip and goblin support this.

only always.vip after 2021/10/22

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Then if other pools solve the memo for gate.io, there will be no reason for miners not to moving to other pools.
Grinmint can be a pioneer in this regard. 2miners and others can do this too.

Also for this, thank you. This is an admirable act of network decentralization

I am available for a short meeting with mining-pool owners / operators.

  • Can someone please send me some details about the process for gate.io to deposit/withdraw GRIN in order for us to understand what we should implement.

Still unsure why Chinese GRIN users not using TradeOgre GRIN/BTC which is an Exchange who supports GRIN since I can remember being a part of GRIN.

Also if you start using TreadeOgre, you will notice there is no need for TOR , you can use Slatepacks which is not requiring a TOR connection. It’s like exchanging a text file with the Exchange in order to transfer GRIN.

Deposit at TradeOgre:

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The issues is that Gate.io is using an inconvenient implementation of Slatepack, far from what is defined in our RFCs. I wish we could help Gate.io somehow if they can reach us in Keybase I’m sure we can find a way to have a more stable implementation. To be honest, Gate.io is causing a lot of confusion.

@mcm-mike taken from https://www.gate.io/article/19663:

Gate.io has completed the GRIN wallet upgrading and added support for Slatepack addresses. The obsoleted URL addresses will not be supported any longer. This upgrading brings some major changes:
1) Slatepack address will be used for depositing GRIN. The Memo displaying on your deposit page is exactly the decimal part of the amount you should deposit. For any amount you want to deposit, the decimal part must match the memo exactly, while the whole number part can be of any number. For example, if the Memo for your GRIN deposit page is 722413, then you can deposit 1.722413, 2.722413, 10.722413 , 100.722413, etc.
2. Slatepack address will be used for withdrawing GRIN. The URL address is not supported any longer.

Is there any special reason why miners from China are not using TradeOgre? The process seems to be clear and simple:

With grinmint miners can also use slatepack messages too. They don’t need Tor.

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Because Chinese users need CNY, they need OTC , and tradeogre cannot be opened in some areas of China, and Google is banned in China, so Chinese users cannot easily register tradeogre.

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This was pretty self explanatory. Then there is a definite need for gate.io for Chinese users.

I totally agree with that. However, I know that changing Gate.io is difficult. Because after Grin’s last hard-fork, it took a long time for them to open deposit withdrawals. They do these processes very slowly.
So my idea is to first make the pools available for gate.io by setting memo.
Afterwards, contacting gate.io and encouraging them to switch to slatepack with conforms to RFCs.

Let me know if I get the problem right.

Miners are using the pool that lets them send the rewards to Gate.io because they can set the memo. Interesting… but people can use Tor Bridges to bypass censorship. If this is too much hustle, they can always use slatepack messages to transfer their rewards to their own wallets. Then send the Grins to Gate.io to their accounts. It seems that this is too much too (?).

Mmm… but… Is there any guarantee that they will switch pools if another pool lets them to do the same thing with the memo?

thats the point. Gate.io wants 1000 confirmation and blocks you to deposit this way . You get the idea? And memo ,idk why memo is needed?

Not only pool ,exchanges are limited and centralized for Grin. Only 2 functioning,half methods.

@davidtavarez This is interesting to me too. However, we do not know the conditions as we do not live in China.
But check this

This is said that the Tradeogre exchange, which almost no one knows, is banned in China. China seems pretty strict on these issues.

So if users are using Goblinpool and always.vip to transfer Grins to gate.io, it would make sense to make other pools compatible with it first.
This does not provide a guarantee, but we must do something about it. We cannot allow hash to be collected in one place.
If after doing this the pools prevent more than 33% or 40% of users from coming in, the issue will be resolved.
As @DQF said

I do understand now, the “comfort” factor miners are looking for.
They want to “just” mine and don’t worry about technology, just plug in a miner and transfer funds from pool to the desired exchanges and not using own walltes with own private key’s.

In this case I think, each and everyone miner need to take the decision which pool they are using.

For Grinmint, miners could mine on it and use GRIN++ to transfer the funds to Gate.io, this way they could help GRIN.

Also I think the exposure here on the forum is only reaching a limit amount of Asian miners, not sure if they even have access to the GRIN forum?

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I guess it is only a small factor, but probably they also want to avoid additional transaction fees that they would have to pay for sending from their own wallet.

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Do you think GRIN fees are a factor?
Not sure what the current (today’s) fees are but they are negligible , but if you have a huge farm it might add up.

I think it’s convenience and mostly the Chinese regulations which hinders them to mine freely.

There could be an immediate incentive to transition to grin mint (while the usability is being addressed consistent with always.vip or not) like “first 100 miners to switch will be entered for a chance to win 1000/333/100 grin” verified by mining pool payout on X date in the future.

Just an idea, and then use a 1433 grin worth of community pool funds (roughly 530 USD now) under context of “inclusive community action” if I recall correctly.

This would help ease the “fees for transferring from their own wallet” but not necessarily the training for a possibly new technique for them.

pool.always.vip urges users to use other pools.

“Always.vip has more than 50% of grin net hash, so if it’s possible please go to other pools.”

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Despite all the warnings, miners are just switching to always.vip. No switching to any other pools.
Source: Grin (GRIN) Cuckatoo32 | Mining Pools

This is amazing interesting. I am quite concerned that people are leaving the network so centralized and powerless.

Unfortunately, this post is useless. Now, we need to find a permanent solution. If we don’t do anything, we can all wait for Grin’s destruction.

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