Rapid growth of
GHash.IO mining pool, seen over the past few months, has been driven by our determination to offer innovative solutions within the Bitcoin ecosystem combined with significant investment in resource. Our investment, participation and highly motivated staff confirm it is our intention to help protect and grow the broad acceptance of Bitcoin and categorically in no way harm or damage it. We never have and never will participate in any 51% attack or double spend against Bitcoin. Still, we are against temporary solutions, which could repel a 51% threat.
In any market, competition and innovation drives growth and that is particularly true in an emerging and disruptive environment such as Bitcoin.
Successful and innovative companies cannot be expected to limit their growth or competitiveness as a direct result of their success. However, this is the situation we find ourselves in when faced with the community perception of the threat of a 51% attack on Bitcoin. Asking our users to not use our services or to use competing solutions is not conducive to fostering innovation. Implementing a pool fee to our pool contradicts principles of our operation from the very launch of GHash.IO. It also does not address the core issue only pushing the problem a few weeks or months down the road when another pool or perhaps GHash.IO again grows towards 51%.
We do fully recognise the concerns and possible threat posed by an entity with malicious intent taking control of enough mining power to exploit the 51% scenario, but we also have confidence and agree with the views expressed by the Bitcoin Foundation that any such exploitation or attack ”would be obvious it was happening, and pretty easy to defend against. The transparent nature of the blockchain provides unprecedented insight for all to investigate and report such behaviours.
We also recognise however that a long term preventative solution to the threat of a 51% attack does have to be found, the current situation we find ourselves in (essentially being punished for our success) is damaging not only to us, but to the growth and acceptance of Bitcoin long term, which is something we are all striving for.
Sorry, but to set up such a scalable and dare I say relatively high-margin operation, you
had to have seen this coming, right?
Also, can anyone verify - I thought I'd heard some time ago that due to the "spot" nature of network hashing share, the 51% attack actually discretely manifests itself as the production of 6 or more blocks in a row by one entity (51% power is just what you would need, on average, to accomplish such a feat). If this is correct...I mean, GHash.io has produced 6 consecutive blocks in the chain
on a number of occasions. I've personally observed a chain of 8 (tracking via Blockchain homepage) on at least one occasion - and let me tell you, nobody said jack until their averaged share of the network power (measured by floating average share of blocks produced over the past 24/48/96 hours) began to near the false-warning 51% mark.
Again, correct me if I'm wrong, but even without 51% of the active hashing power on the network you can still carry out the exact bruteforce attack described by what most people refer to as "the dreaded 51% attack" - all you need is enough luck to mine 6 consecutive blocks. Satoshi himself referred to the single-entity (pool) 6-block-mark as the point of 'computational irreversibility'...