The Bitcoin Hard Driver Debacle

It’s been a busy couple of months with my day job, so I haven’t had a lot of time and/or energy to focus on all the cool stuff going on with Burst, but as most of you reading this (does anyone read this?) has already heard.. here’s something that is extremely NOT cool.

In August of this year (2018), a new coin named “Bitcoin Hard Driver” came online, which uses almost exactly the same Proof of Capacity method as Burst. It even has links for TurboPlotter 9000 and JohnnyFFM’s miner as their main software to plot and mine. How ridiculous is that? If you’re going to blatantly rip something off, at least change a few lines of code. The only difference I can see is they have their own wallet (to link up with their chain) and the payout scheme for mining is different.

I don’t know how much work goes into setting one of these things up, but it seem to me that it’s a money grab. Hype it up and sell it off when they’re done screwing the little guys.

What’s the Debacle?

The thing about using the exact same plots as Burst, is that the coin can now be mined by the current Burstcoin miners. No re-plotting required. It’s my understanding that quite a few miners have already set up secondary mining software to use their plots for both chains. Hell, I probably will too if I get enough time to look into it. It’s trading for around $3 USD vs. Burst’s $0.004 USD. No comparison on cost. People are stupid though. Setting currency aside, Burst is the more valuable coin, with a stronger community and *should* eventually win out.

The trouble comes with the PoCC taking advantage of this on their pools. Because us Burst miners continually poll their wallet to see if a new block has started, it’s simple enough for them to modify the program to return the secondary request as well. At that point our miners look for a second deadline, which is used to submit to the BHD wallet.  This effectively hijacks all ~119,000TB that are on their pools and uses it to earn the PoCC money.

What’s Wrong With That?

Now.. there’s nothing wrong with mining new coin, but it shouldn’t be done without your knowledge or permission.

The PoCC needs to realize that they have a responsibility to the community. They are the face of Burst, and for new users, the default wallet, plotter, miner and pools to use. If they don’t want to tank the coin completely, above developing new tech, they should make sure there’s a solid foundation of TRUST.

They originally stated that this was a “test” to see if dual coin mining was possible, but what’s to stop the PoCC from releasing a wallet that “tests” the ability to send them your passphrase? Even with open source software, all but the few users who have the knowledge and time to do a code review could potentially lose all of their coin if this happened. Now, I’m not saying this would happen.. or that the PoCC would even consider this.. but they’ve lost a good amount of trust in this last misuse of resources.

If the PoCC wanted to really test their dual mining capabilities, there’s absolutely no reason they couldn’t have done this with their own hardware. If their true purpose was to destabilize the new coin with all the capacity they have available to them (yours and mine), this should have been made clear and they could have created a new pool for opting in instead of making use of all the set & forget miners already connected to their network. Just because they could do this, doesn’t mean that it’s in any way acceptable.

What To Do About It?

The best thing to do about this is just to get off of their pools. I’m currently on their 0-100 pool with my meager plots, but I’m swapping over to a different pool now. Really annoying since I need to sync from late October.

If you’re changing pools, do your research and pick one that works well for you. I’ll be swapping to 0-100.burst-team.us for now.

Swapping Pools

To swap pools, first make sure your wallet is fully synchronized, meaning all of the latest blocks are downloaded. After that, choose Tools → Reward Recipient from the top menu in your wallet.

In the pop-up window, enter your account and the account of the pool you’re changing to. In my case, the 0-100.burst-team.us account is 15595832744999856002, which can be found on their Config tab.

Selecting Local wallet is fine. It’ll send the transaction out to the network. Choose a Fee. The default is fine, or you can use the minimum if you’re frugal.

Once you’ve hit submit, enter your passphrase in order to confirm the transaction. You’ll need to wait 4 blocks (approx. 4 min. x 4 = 16 min.) until the recipient is set and confirmed by the network.

Updating The Miner

At this point, if your miner is still running, you’ll start to see some errors occur. Because your reward recipient doesn’t match the old pool, you’ll see an error telling you so.. or you should. It depends on the error messages your pool sends back and your mining setup.

I’m still using Scavenger since Johnny’s optimizations for the ODROID currently can’t be beat, so I’ll edit my configuration to use the new pool info.

Opening the config.yaml file, I’ll update the url to match the new pool –  http://0-100.burstforum.net:8080 and while I’m at it, I’ll update the target_deadline as well to match the current network difficulty.

To test that the new setup is working, just wait the 16 minutes and start up the miner. All seems good for me. Deadline accepted! If you see an error message about recipients not matching, just wait a little longer. The 4 block confirmation still needs to happen.

At this point, visiting the http://0-100.burst-team.us:8080/ website and clicking the All Miners tab, I can see my account at the very bottom.

Success!

Suggestion

This is my method of showing the PoCC that I’m not ok with them hijacking my resources without consent or compensation. If you read this and possibly the hundreds of comments on Reddit as well, and you’d like to send a real message that it’s not fine with you, I suggest you do the same.