Hashrate Theft Prevention and Pool Drift Detection

Do you know when someone changes the pool on one of your ASICs? FARMGOD does.

How hashrate is stolen

A miner works for whichever pool account its settings point to. Change the pool address and the worker, and everything the machine earns goes to somebody else.

Nothing breaks when that happens. The miner keeps running, its hashrate looks the way it always did, and its temperatures are fine. Only the payout is missing, and on a farm with thousands of machines a handful of redirected miners can go unnoticed for weeks.

It does not take much to do it: access to the miner's own web page is enough. A password that was never changed, a firmware from a doubtful source, or a person with a laptop on the local network.

How FARMGOD keeps your hashes yours

You set your pools once in FARMGOD, for the whole fleet or per Device-Set. From then on FARMGOD knows where every miner should be hashing, and with every reading it checks where the miner really is.

With Hashrate Theft Prevention switched on, three things happen when a miner turns up on a pool that is not yours:

1. Detected. FARMGOD sees that the miner's pool address differs from the one you configured.
2. Reported. Your Telegram group gets the alert, with the miner's address: [ WARN ] Potential Hashrate-Theft!
3. Restored. FARMGOD writes your pools back to the miner, and reports that too: [ INFO ] Pools updated.

Nobody has to be at a screen for any of this. The miner is back on your pool before the next shift starts, and the alert tells you which machine to take a closer look at.

Pool drift: the harmless cousin

Not every mismatch is an attack. Worker names are often built from a miner's IP address, and when the network hands that miner a new address, its worker name no longer fits. The miner still hashes for your pool, but under a name that belongs to no machine, and your pool statistics stop matching your racks.

FARMGOD treats this as what it is: housekeeping. It corrects the worker name on its own and notes [ INFO ] Pool config drift detected. No alarm, no theft wording. That way a theft alert keeps its meaning: when you see one, a miner really was pointed somewhere else.

Switching it on

Hashrate Theft Prevention is a checkbox in Settings › Pools, next to the worker name settings. It is a deliberate switch, because writing pools back to a miner is not something software should do unasked. Connect a Telegram bot to receive the alerts.

Pool management, with Hashrate Theft Prevention, is part of Cloud PRO and of every Private VPS.