Fellow miners, Fellow blockchain supporters,
If you are not aware by now, we are currently facing a growing danger in the form of Nicehash, which is now fully automated with bots, who's owners now openly attempt to bully the market with huge and expensive orders for hashrate rentals.
Nicehash has supported the use of bots for a while now, which in the beginning made sense and seemed like a smart move to provide savvy miners with a time saving way to boost profits. What this has turned into however is a growing menace which poses a very real threat, specifically the threat of unprecedented aggregation and centralization of enormous amounts of hashpower into the hands of the highest bidder.
To further complicate the situation, these automation bots are now combined with profit data from major mining pools, in particular the WAMP data feed provided by Prohashing (a popular multipool), to monitor coin/algorithm profitability and react to profit opportunities.
The automation bots have now been implemented at regular price intervals on Standard Orders, which sit idle until a profit opportunity appears, at which point the "Limit" of certain orders will ramp up (often to several TH/s) and claim all available miners and focus on the new opportunity. Once profitability begins to drop, the orders will ramp the limit back down again.
Reaction to these developments has been so far tolerant, as pool owners have been understandably reluctant to discourage clever innovation, and more than likely this has been lucrative for them as well so far. Essentially such practices make good sense when applied responsibly, and with reasonable safeguards against abuse - something which holds true with all systems and automation techniques.
Other miners though, and in particular those who own their own hardware, have begun to complain about the unfair practice of directing what has now become quite enormous hashrate surges towards the pools in which they mine, quickly driving up coin difficulty and reducing profitability.
Another approach used is to simply place very large Fixed orders (10x - 100x larger than the average) to control the prices of the orders on Nicehash and drive prices higher for everyone else. This obviously benefits the miners who sell hashpower there, and something similar has been used by Nicehash themselves as part of a stated policy to ensure a fair market. The practice now however been co-opted by the bot owners, and has devolved into what now amounts to abusive market manipulation and price fixing.
To wrap this posting up, I'll return to emphasize the topic of dangerous centralization of enormous amounts of hashpower into the hands of the highest bidder . It doesn't take much imagination to see the potential for a handful of people to use Nicehash as a tool to manipulate the market and brute force the competition.
As a Nicehasah user myself, I have watched these alarming developments gather pace and strengthen over a mere 3-4 week period, and the trend has actually accelerated over the past couple of weeks.
A final closing comment to those who will inevitably ask for proof - this posting is intended to be an informative wake-up call to the growing danger posed by Nicehash, and to provide the level of detail to enable others to go verify for themselves. I am of course available to explain anything that isn't quite clear, or to assist anyone who would care to follow-up on my conclusions to verify for themselves.
Thank you kindly for reading my post - @parallaxx