Topic: Boycott GHASH.IO/CEX.IO permanently (Read 4048 times)

Rock53 -- please take the time to do a bit more research.  Much of what you said may be your experience but is not based on sound understanding of mining.

The perfect storm you mentioned, difficulty increased and hashing power more than doubled isn't a perfect storm....  Difficulty increased happened *because* hashing power increased.  The two are not independent of each other.  The only thing you should pay attention to is difficulty increasing.  It represents the bitcoin protocol trying to adjust so that blocks don't get solved more often than about every 10 minutes, no matter how much hashing power there is.

If Slush's made you twice as much as GHash or BTC Guild, then you were simply getting lucky for a short period of time.  If you waited a bit more with Slush's you'd see it all equalize.  The only reason to choose one pool over the other is their reporting tools and their consistency in paying out.  Other than that, you will see the exact same payout over time (perhaps more for a day or two then less for a day or two).  The smaller the pool, the greater the variance and length of high days vs. low days.  But over time, they will all be the same.

As to you selling S1's .... great idea... their value is approaching 0 due to their electric inefficiency so good time to bail. 

The problem is not the small miners - the problem is the large mining farms/groups.  If every small miner boycotted GHash.io, it would be a very small percentage.  If you calculate all of the current hashing power, it is around 100Ph/s, currently GHash.io has around 42 or 43.  When they went over 51%, one or two large miners voluntarily pulled 8-10 Ph/s of hashing power, so as not to cause things to come crashing down.  We need to blame someone who owns 5 or 10 percent of the total hashing power pointing that power to Ghash.io.  I don't care about all of the conspiracy theories that surrond GHash, the thing that I care about is that the only thing that the small miner can do is to mine at GHash or shut down their mining rigs.  Mabe we should all solo mine and if we all get lucky, we can throw GHash a curve and cut down on all the blocks.

If you are a small miner, where can you go today to mine?  And I don't mean to mine at a profit, but to minmize your losses and come anywhere near breaking even!  Just like every small miner, I tried a lot of the different pools - Slush, BTC Guild and GHash.io, just to name a few.  I was very happy to mine at Slush's pool, because I could make more that at the bigger mining pools.  I was making twice as much with Slush then with GHash.io and BTC Guild, but then a few weeks ago, the perfect storm hit Slush - the difficulty increased and the hashing power more than doubled - it went from 2Ph/s to over 5Ph/s.  Slush went from finding 8-10 blocks a day to only 3-4 and the payout was cut in half because of the increase of hashing power.  Maybe some of the large miners pointed away from GHash.io to Slush and other pools to reduce GHash's 51% several weeks ago.

For all these reasons, I am shutting down my 10 S-1 Antminers and putting them on Ebay.

Mark my words, I have a feeling Ghash.IO is not tagging all their blocks now. I suspect that they are trying to make it appear that they are not getting anywhere near that 51% hash mark in order to bring users back … The end result will be the same as all their past shady moves…  People need to look at their past, they don't give up … and they are not going away .

Just because end-users are evil through their ignorance is no reason for a pool-owner to shirk it's responsibility.  Ghash.IO owes nothing to anybody, just like you owe nothing to a man who may have been hit by and car and is laying in the street.  They could do a much better job like another pool has already demonstrated in the past - but they refuse to. If that doesn't smack of arrogance or contempt....

The problem is not with GHASH.  It is not relevant whether they are or aren't "evil".  The problem is with bitcoin itself if neither protocol nor the community are able to address one "evil" actor. 

If people are to invest their life savings into bitcoin, they need to be guaranteed there is no inherent problems with the protocol.  There clearly is.  The whole point of bitcoin is that we don't trust the government to do the right thing.  Yet we put trust in some random pool with no built-in mechanisms to automatically prevent it from being able to do something evil?

I think many of the newer users commenting here haven't taken the time to research what has been going on since 2009.  People say Ghash.IO would be shooting themselves if they did such an attack - the very same people not knowing that they have double spent before and there is proof of this behavior (not just conjecture).

They do not participate in the network development (as evidenced by their minimalistic communication) and they have no intentions of proactively slowly their growth despite what they say.  Take an example from BTCGuild who got to 40% last year - the pool op eleuthria raised pool fees and moved off getwork.

Ghash.io has not done a single thing to retard their growth.  Go on living with naivete - I think I know where the retard is...

who are ghash anyway? ...... I mean, really?

They said they would never gain 51% of the hashrate ..... they did!
They said that they would allow users to use other pools ... but didn't!
They said that they would limit new membership ..... they haven't!
Now they say they will never launch a 51% attack on the bitcoin network ..... bearing in mind that ghash has been accused of double spending before, their assurances do not inspire much confidence in my opinion!

What do you guys think?

GHash isn't planning to launch any attacks, they've stated it themselves.

Boycott a pool is not any type of solution. I find it amazing people are still on this subject and their only focus on hating GHash for what...offering a better product than others. Meanwhile the Bitcoin devs are not particularly concerned over 51% 'easily seen and defended against'

And in case no one noticed in the last 7 days the total hash rate of the Bitcoin network has increased by 50 PETA Hashes (from about 85PH to 135PH) and difficulty is due for a 25% jump next up. Personally I think that is a more noteworthy change in the network dynamic than the  topic of this thread.

I've been following this thread and one thing becomes more and more clear by the day: 51% attack is truly the doomsday scenario for bitcoin.  There is no solution.

I've read Satoshi Nakamoto's paper and the assumption he makes at the outset is that in the world of bitcoin, a dishonest miner can never and will never obtain more hashing power than a group of honest miners.  He never prepared for the scenario of a 50+% miner on whose honesty we must all depend.  He alludes to the fact that should that happen, bitcoin is doomed.

Let's look at possible solutions:

1.  Let's "convince" all the fellow miners to abandon the pool that is proven to be dishonest....

This goes against human nature.  If you build any system, economic or political where the "greater good" is at conflict with what an individual perceives to be in their immediate interest, the individual's interest will win out.  This is why communism and socialism have failed.  History is full of examples where any attempts to "shame" greedy actors into behaving in socially-centric manner have not had any success.  Humans will only act in socially-centric manner if and only if that action benefits them individually.  Why do you think the US government is borrowing from our children $0.40 for each $1 they spend?  Because our children can't vote them out.

2. Let's provide a technical solution that penalizes pooling. 

So, this will only put the casual miner (like myself) out of business.  We will all be forced to sell our hardware on pennies on the dollar to the "organized miners" who all mine individually but share the same wallet between their 20,000 S1 miners.  Net effect is exactly the same.  There's going to be several such actors and it would be very easy for, say the government of China, to just buy out enough of them to get the 51% control of hashing power.  And, they proceed to destroy the Bitcoin.  I should not single out China here... the US government would do the same in a heartbeat.

3.  There is no 3rd solution.  The miners must follow the longest chain.  If they don't, there will be multiple chains and no one will ever know if their transaction is confirmed.  Longest chain is controlled by anyone who controls 50.1% hashing power.  That actor must be "trusted" to not double-spend.  Regardless of whether destroying bitcoin is or isn't in the best interest of the controller of 50.1% hashing power, the fact we have to trust such an actor is categorically and fundamentally contradictory to the entire premise of bitcoin, whose motto is "trust no one". 

Perhaps smarter people can figure out a solution here, but I just don't see it. 

poeople will only boycott cex when they realize how much cex is ripping them off or if they get shown where esle to mine for way less fees
just saying boycott cex will not work!

so post links to some of the better pools

its hard to boycott them when they are so above competition
but it must be done, throw them in hell 

Hmm, look at the first 3 numbers, that's the recent history.  Lately, it's been pretty good.

Average 95% doesn't look too hot to me.

Hmm, seems okay of late:



Don't like Eligius, because I'm not a big time miner, so I'd rather take the 0.01 BTC as often as I can.

I've been having much better payouts since leaving the Guild.

build better alternatives , reward users for usage , easier said than done.

I wondering how much they are paying for new cryptography chip accelerator ...

I agree with your generalized statement that I bolded, but consider this:
Would you rather have 9.5 BTC (assuming the pool took a 5% fee) worth 650 USD or 10.1 BTC worth $580 USD.  You think BTC price has fluctuated down for no reason?  The scare of 51% is clearly dominating the market.

Now let's play this worse case scenario - Ghash.IO does do some stupid attack and BTC become a has been coin leading to some other coin such as LTC or PPC taking over (LTC still has issues with centralization).  How much are you 10.1BTC x $0 USD worth now - nothing.

If miners are looking strictly at gaining the most BTC then yes they are more likely to get them at Ghash.IO -  but they are showing their stupid side.  Greed makes people stupid and illogical - and that is clearly evidenced here.

For some of us who have 10K+ BTC this is not a casual hobby but our future, and I don't give a rats ass about some 1-2% more mining income when I'm risking the whole boatload.

You can Solo Mine it can take up to 4 days to crack a block. I have little money. $(