We're missing something. To block withold attack of this magnitude (given the luck change) would have to be 2,000TH per pool. To do this to eligius and BTC guild for 2 months would not make sense unless they could profit elsewhere.
Not true. By going unnoticed and getting paid they only suffered a small percentage of the total payout as a loss. If they haven't fixed the bug by now, it is probably something wrong with the hardware and would be a total loss if they didn't scam unsuspecting pools. This is not a defense of their actions, only my attempt to find a root cause for the attacker to continue to block withhold.
The only people making hardware, writing their own software and mining at the ~2Ph/s scale that I am aware of is ______.
If this is the case and it is the pool with the biggest percentage right now, then they are after 51% and seek to undermine, control and possibly destroy BTC or at least damage the reputation. There has been speculation about them hiding their hashing power by splitting it and obscuring the pool that found the blocks, but since the miners there refuse to leave to another pool, I don't think much if anything can be done.
Regardless, at least these people were found and have had their btc frozen. It's a possibility that their delay in attempting to withdraw the coins was an attempt to slide under the radar while they were busy doing the same to other pools. No matter what, we can go ahead and figure that they are reading these posts and are either laughing about it (thinking they got away with something), or seething because Wizkid made an official post about them. Either way, we need to stand with Wizkid, Luke Jr and Eleuthria. Threats are just that...threats. Terrorists seek to cause fear amongst the people. Extortionists just want to line their greedy pockets from other people's hard work.
Has anyone taken into account that instead of another pool being responsible that it could be a ASIC company that has failed over and over again to ship products to consumers who pre-ordered months in advance?