An interesting result of the recent Dust Storm and issues with low powered clients is that MiningPoolStats right now has a pretty good indicator of which Chia pools are faking netspace and who is at least reporting automatically from their code. This is super fascinating to me and came to me via someone who would like to remain anonymous.
Check out the following screenshots from this morning, November 2nd, and let the graphs speak for themselves. Everyone should be reporting a dip in netspace at this scale. What that dip looks like would be determined by the specifics of how long a period of time they average out over for their reporting number. Some are clearly using different values to each other. But that isn’t cheating, that’s just a decision. The ones who are completely flat are doing something else entirely, and I will let you come to your own conclusion about them.
The most important thing about joining a pool, in my opinion, is trust which is why I spend some time getting to know a lot of the pools in my All About Pools series. You can can tell the ones I spoke to are not faking it.
Update: Fazenda Pool has reached out to me and informed me that they are not faking netspace, but that they report invalid partials as netspace. They provided some screenshots of the stales during the time. I can’t qualify if this is true, but it is certainly feasible and it is possible, as mentioned, that this might be the result of reporting differences for a few of them. I believe them, I don’t think they are cheating, and their homepage does show they are just recovering from a dip, but I do recommend to them that they update their reporting to more closely match existing best practices.
