Popular Mining Pool obtains rewards stolen from The SINOVATE Community
The purpose of this article is to respond to BSOD’s Official Press Release, dated June 8th 2019, and to expose this Mining Pool as a Criminal Enterprise.
In their own words, BSOD states:
“…
in the process of studying the current SIN situation, we found the following suspicious things: The unknown pool mines a significant part of the SIN blocks, while the entire masternode reward goes to a set of the same addresses. As a result, the rest of the masternode holders receive less profit … at the moment more than 60% of the network hashrate is owned by an unknown private pool … unfortunately, at the time of publication of this article, the vulnerability is not fixed and has a critical status. The SIN development team is currently unfoundedly blaming our pool team for the error.
…”
The SINOVATE Team is blaming BSOD for this error, but this claim is not unfounded.
On 06/06/2019, it was reported to the SINOVATE (SIN) Team by a number of Community Members that mining rewards were not being distributed to workers. SINOVATE found that the BSOD Mining Pool was intentionally burning every block which it found.
BSOD were encouraged to fix this issue, but instead indicated that they were unaware of it. Also, it was suggested that a bug or calculating issue within the SINOVATE code was the route of the problem. On the morning of 07/06/2019, SINOVATE once again instructed BSOD to fix the mining rewards issue. During this period, BSOD had 4–5 Gigahash (Ghs) hash rate within their X25X Pool.
The SINOVATE Team discovered that BSOD were manipulating block rewards after burning a block, in order to send these to malicious addresses with the intention of dumping the SIN Market. For three days, stolen rewards were seen in the irregular volume of sell orders within the $SIN markets.
Examples of stolen rewards can be found below, which were sent to designated addresses:
The above represents the manipulation carried out by BSOD on its own Public Pool.
BSOD’s argument is baseless, and cannot be seen as a defense.
BSOD states: “We note that almost simultaneously, a significant part of the hashrate from many pools went in an unknown direction. In the screenshot below, we have identified this time interval with two parallel vertical lines, and you can see that the hash rate has decreased significantly in the pools “rig.tokyo”, “icemining.ca” and “bsod.pw”. Therefore, the accusations that this hashrate belonged to the bsod.pw pool do not make any sense to say the least — it does not make sense for us to direct our hashrate to another pool, thereby losing commissions and helping competitors to find blocks … the pool … is interested in the popularity and high market rate of a particular cryptocurrency. Accordingly, there is no point for the pool to act in a destructive way on a project.”
This is the extent of BSOD’s defense, to accusations brought forward by The SINOVATE Team.
Those who are familiar with 51% attacks understand the value in controlling hash rate, and it is clearly evident that BSOD had means, motive, and opportunity to take advantage of the SIN Mining Community. Despite efforts to portray themselves as the innocent party, BSOD’s Press Release instead provides an inept response to the aforementioned issues, and conveys the picture of an enterprise seeking to mitigate legal repercussions, as well as public criticism.
The BSOD hash rate was massively reduced, after SINOVATE discovered and discussed this fraudulent activity directly with BSOD. Hash power was moved to a Private Pool, with significantly more powerful miners. This unknown Private Miner is inherent within BSOD. During the period of manipulation, BSOD received mining rewards of 2750 per block, rather than the typical 500.
BSOD were aware of this vulnerability, yet no explanation was provided as to why hashing power was moved to a Private Pool. This move was entirely unnecessary, and represented a huge red-flag.
The above picture represents BSOD’s Public Pool hash rate, prior to the SINOVATE Team warning them about the possibility of manipulation.
This picture shows how BSOD moved all of their hash rate for SINOVATE to a Private Pool and significantly increased the number of miners, which in turn created an upsurge of around 7 GHz. This hashing power was used to manipulate rewards, prompting the SINOVATE Community to express their concerns.. Particular attention should be paid tothe red 61.09% unknown hash rate.
What’s Next?
We are extremely disappointed with BSOD’s actions, and will instill measures to ensure that the SINOVATE Community does not experience reward theft again in the future. We have worked tirelessly over the last few days, in order to implement the following solutions:
- Mandatory Wallet Upgrade V1.03 and Fork at block height 176.500 for the vulnerability fix. SINOVATE Community members must upgrade to this Wallet, prior to block 176.500.
- Additional sin nodes reward checks, enforced at block 176.500
- Sin nodes stability improvements
- Expired and New Start Required fix
- Faster synchronization
2. The new T-Rex v.0.11.1 Miner is 3 times faster than its previous version. Thanks to the T-Rex team for making the fastest miner in 40 hours. This will ensure that Malicious Private Pool Miners will be unable to obtain hash rate majority at any time, increasing block finding difficulty ten fold.
3. In order to mitigate rewards losses experienced by miners across the last 4 days on the BSOD Mining Pool, there will be a delay in providing confirmation of these via the SINOVATE Explorer. Rewards will be paid back to miners from the SINOVATE Development Wallet, until the expiration of their SIN Nodes.
4. SINOVATE’s Official Pool https://pool.sinovate.io will reward 30% increased block rewards to miners, in order to increase the public hash rate for a period of one week. Please only mine to these pools for the time being.
Many thanks to the fantastic SINOVATE Community, for its continued great support.
Join us and stay tuned for all forthcoming updates via our website and social media platforms:
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Author: Amit Kaushal
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