Credit Mining for Others lower Token Balance

[Nubro01]

• I have tried with the latest pre-release version and I still can reproduce the issue.
  August 9th is doing nothing so went back to the 6th

Tribler version/branch+revision:

Operating system and version:

Windows 10 build 17735

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

Start Credit mining by selecting mining icon in Channels

Expected behavior:

Token balance to stay the same or increase, since I help other!

Actual behavior:

Token balance is going down.

Relevant log file output:

[devos50]

Thank you for your report. The most likely explanation for this is that credit mining first 'invests' in a swarm by downloading its content. This is needed since a user that performs credit mining needs the content locally in order to seed it to others. @egbertbouman could you confirm this?

Related to this issue, I'm planning to give more insights in the token history of users (as documented in issue #3731.

[egbertbouman]

@devos50 That would be my guess. Credit mining also doesn't perform well when there are a lot of overseeded swarms, so that could also be a factor.

[Nubro01]

I am already now on -6.6 gig and I fail to see what this is not a bug, I geuss I just have to stop seeding anonymous and uncheck the option enable token mining, this is costing me and it looks that I am not gaining from this. I had a +6000 score before and now all that is gone!!!

[EinNarr]

@Nubro01 I am very sorry about the negative balance change to your account.
The current algorithm does not perform well, sometimes even negatively. I suggest you temporally turn it off before we release an update to it. We are currently working hard and doing experiments on that to find out a more optimized algorithm.

Sorry for your inconvenience.

[devos50]

I think this issue is too much work to address in Tribler 7.4, which mostly focusses on Python 3 compatibility. Let's move it to the next milestone.

[synctext]

Agreed, RC1 of 7.4.0 is due upcoming days...

[Nubro01]

In 7.4 my token ballance is again lowering, while I am NOT downloading, just seeding. I have no clue who or what is downloading through my machine at this very moment. If I am assisting others in their downloads then I should get tokens instead of loosing tokens!

[xoriole]

@Nubro01 This is discussed in the forum here:
https://forum.tribler.org/t/something-wrong-with-token-balance/5558/8

There is an existing issue of leaking torrent while doing anonymous seeding because of seeding to non-Tribler users but if you're not seeding anything it could a separate bug. We'll revisit this issue after 7.4 release.

[ichorid]

Let's continue discussion of Mining-related problems on #4363