Topic: Cartel manipulating mining difficulty? - page 3. (Read 1548 times)

see nothing wrong, miners could even stop mining at all for some time to force a sharp drop down of diff its just capitalism

this is relative hashrate chart not hashrate chart.
for example this means something like this:
btc hashrate: 5000 : 98.03%
bcc hashrate: 100 : 1.96%

then after a week:
btc hashrate: 5000 : 83.33%
bcc hashrate: 1000 : 16.66%

arbitrary numbers but that is practically what the chart shows.

---

nothing about bitcoin has changed so far. the blocks are being mined at the same rate. or at least if anything has changed it is not yet noticeable.

on the other hand it seems like many have been waiting for this difficulty adjustment of BCC (as I have also suspected some time ago) and as it was lowered a lot, they rushed to mine it. currently in the past 1 hour there has been about 66 blocks mined.
105 in 2 hours
129 in 3 hours

but this still doesn't prove anything from bitcoin is taken to dedicate to bitcoin cash.

Well, it seems that my idea has more substance behind it than I myself first thought. Some dude above went rather verbose about me actually providing some proofs at last. Now it's time to look more closely into the matter (I think that should pass as a proof). As always, everyone is to think for themselves and draw conclusions on their own. And I am eager to hear the opinion of that dude too

Hashrate chart



Difficulty chart



Speed chart



Difficulty adjustment chart



The last two charts seem to be particularly interesting. First, note that at the speed chart the hashrate divided by difficulty went below 1 for regular Bitcoin. In simple terms, it pretty much means lack of hashing power for the given difficulty. Second, note that the next difficulty adjustment will happen in just 2 days (I would say the cartel has timed their actions perfectly), and, ironically, the mining difficulty of Bitcoin is going down as I speculated in the opening post. Since miners mining both regular Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash are essentially the same miners, the hashpower they have has to be split between the two coins, and thus with Bitcoin Cash they invented a nice tool to manipulate the difficulty by moving the hashrate power from one coin to the other when the right time comes (and earn handsomely at that)

Interesting idea, but i think they wouldn't do that since they could risk their profit and their reputation could dropped (unless they make anonymous pool or something similar). But if their goal to make bitcoin/bitcoin cash block production unstable then spread FUD about it, then some cartel might do it.

What about "reducing the difficulty A LOT to help with the very low hashrate and production of blocks"?

Would that count as a firmly established fact (sort of proof) or what? Otherwise, what is the purpose of your post? The best part of it you seem to be talking and insinuating about myself specifically (that's nice of course, but that's certainly not what this topic is about). So the miners lowered the difficulty as they saw appropriate, and then a lot of hashrate got instantly poured into Bitcoin Cash (by far exceeding the current difficulty with dozens of blocks being mined hourly). Ironically, it coincided with the massive surge in the price of this coin, which set a perfect playground for earning hefty profits. Not bad, by any means. It might be a one-shot event, indeed, but what prevents miners from manipulating the difficulty again, at least with Bcash (and likely in some other way)?

The miners could theoretically employ such a strategy with any other coin, so it seems unlikely they would create a new coin just for that purpose.  The entire notion also relies on the flimsy (and decidedly cliche by this point) premise that there is indeed a cartel and that one person is supposedly calling all the shots and organising all of this.  It's all a bit tin-foil-hat for my tastes.  A sudden jump in hashrate can be explained innocuously.  If you were a fairly large-scale miner, when it's time to upgrade, would you purchase one or two new pieces of hardware?  Or, would it make more sense to buy in bulk and see proportionally larger gains for your investment?

It doesn't always have to be a conspiracy theory.  Unless you're that bored you need to invent these far-flung fantasies just to give your brain something to do.  That would make far more rational sense than anything you've come up with lately.  

Still, if you're adamant you're on to something, maybe gather some facts and figures and attempt to prove it for once.  You know, rather than just constantly speculating and stirring the pot?  Evidence would be far more compelling that just blowing smoke like usual.  Or is that all you're good for?  Throwing enough mud in the hope it sticks?

not much about the hashrate and how many miners are mining bitcoin cash has changed as far as I can tell. it was just a bitcoin-cash-specific difficulty adjustment that happened to reduce the difficulty A LOT to help with the very low hashrate and production of blocks.

the price is just a pump because they hyped it a lot by a lot of different news like the 8 MB block, being more profitable, and crap like that.

I have read a lot of things about how the miners have done one bad thing or the other. To the manipulation of fees to the launching of bitcoin cash and now manipulating mining difficulty. In as much as I not speaking for them, be we also need to acknowledge some of the good things they have done for bitcoin because they made it available and even made our transactions possible. They also held to the faith long before some of use even find our way here. But my thinking is that if they could have so much control then Satoshi should have curtail that at the beginning.

I think that would be a risky strategy.
Minng in bitcoin cash for two weeks would bring you  lot of bitcoin cahs.
But bitcoin cash is even way more volatile than bitcoin at the moment. Yo can not predict at what price you will be able to sell it.
And after those two weeks you have an incredibly high difficulty there. When you go back, the transactions of bitcoin cash would be really slow.
That would drag down the price of BCH.
I think you could play that game maybe twice, but after that all trust in BCH would be lost.

2 weeks is not that long

And I said nothing about difficulty readjusting in an hour. Where did you get that? Further, just like overfilling mempool acted toward higher fees, the low hashrate will decrease the number of blocks found on the "abandoned" blockchain that would inevitably lead to higher fees as well (which is what miners are always looking for, no matter what). Did fees going to the moon hurt prices in the past? I guess no, so why should this manipulation cause "a lot of harm to both chains and price"? Bitcoin Cash surged yesterday, just about time miners massively started mining it. Just in case, I don't claim anything up to the point of being certain about that, these are just my thoughts

difficulty readjusted takes time (at least for bitcoin it does take time). and that time is about 2 weeks and for 2016 blocks not 1 hour. and i believe this means if they switch to bitcoin cash all of a sudden and mine a lot of blocks they have to wait for at least 2 weeks before coming back to bitcoin to be able to mine more blocks on a reduced difficulty.

and doing things like that will cause a lot of harm to both chains and price will not be kind to these kinds of action, it will drop and they will lose a lot of money because of it.

A strange idea has occurred to me today

As far as I understand it, if the mining difficulty is too low and there is plenty of hashrate all of a sudden, the mining of new blocks won't be limited to just 6 blocks per hour (on average), right? If so, given the emergence of the mining cartel (controlled by Jihan and Bitmain), they could specifically "invent" Bitcoin Cash to manipulate mining difficulty, and thus mine more blocks on both chains than just 2 times more (more than 2×6=12 blocks). If there is not enough hashrate, say, in Bitcoin Cash (as was the case), the mining difficulty will go down, so the cartel will switch their miners to mining this coin. Then there is not enough hashrate left for Bitcoin, the difficulty readjusts soon thereafter, and miners switch back mining more bitcoins on the original blockchain than before



Then rinse, repeat