Topic: Ghash.io has voluntary to suspend parts of service! (Read 5377 times)

How would 51% crash the market? LMAO Do you guys know how the market works? First off we can just at any time change hashing functions and 51% attack is done, and power is back to the people. Hardly any press picked up on this, again you guys want cheap coins so I see it is in your best interest to spread this FUD. But please get your facts straight. One has to actually do the 51% attack for it to be consider that, I doubt ghash was ever going to do that. Remember they have two very profitable businesses in the bitcoin world. This means they get a payment everyday they do a 51% they kill of bitcoins and end their business it would make no sense. If it was a pool that maybe didn't ever talk to the community and came from nothing to powerful, then it is a problem this isn't a problem.

I read the TOS and nothing was mentioned about ghash.io, only cex.io. I also saw nothing about mining, or valid IDs. Do you have a link to your info?

+1

The fact that they didn't proves that they don't want to loose mining power.

Also the whole press release reads like advertising looking to get more miners to join the bandwagen, not comforting at all.

If one mining pool gets 51% it would crash the markets.  The users who didn't have an idea what mining was, would learn real quick.  The press would pick up on it.

The problem here is that their pool fee is 0%.  The guild faced this in the past year and they did the right thing.  They increased their pool fee to drive people away.

Ghash.io will need to do the same shortly. 

The whole ghash.io mining percentage is worrisome in my opinion.   I could totally see the US Gov't trying to mimic this if possible, to try gain some control that we definitely do not want them to have.

I luv conspiracy theories  
This is one of the better I have seen; unlikely but definite plausible (don't get me wrong, I think your post are great, and very relevant to the topic).

Well I can think of a few scenarios, but here's one -

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Scenario 1:British Intelligence already owns Ghash.io

Ghash.io was reportedly sold to unknown British based interests a while back,  since then it has expanded aggressively.

The British Intelligence Services are among the best and arguably most secretive in the world. Their cyber-warfare department is also one of the most 'offensive-capable' in the world.

Besides serving the interests of their central bank, London is also the no.1 financial centre in the world.

To assume that they don't understand the potential risk crypto-currencies pose and to assume that they wouldn't seek to mitigate and control those risks is naive. That IS their job.

For the short and medium term at least, Bitcoin isn't excactly the Enigma machine either. Even 4 years in, Ghash.io has made it look laughably easy to gain control of a double-spend 'doomsday switch' which can be used to decimate the price and trust in Bitcoin at a critical moment. This power they may now wield over Bitcoin is priceless. Best of all it can be blamed on hackers/rogue employee/greedy pool owners, whichever serves their purpose best.

Counter: But 55% of their hashing power is external, as soon as any double spending occurs, those external hashers will rapidly switch over to other pools.

Response: Those are the numbers THEY gave you. I would also suggest that if you can see 45%, what don't you see?

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That's just one of many scenarios. Believe it or not as negative as I've tried to make it, I'm actually British and proud to be and I'm also not selling my BTC. But I think even if it suppresses the price in the short term it's worth keeping this problem front and centre and working to address it now, (by strengthening p2pool etc.)

True

How exactly do you propose that would play out?

Yes I realised that's what you meant the first time. But there is VAST, HUGE amounts of money to be made from having the power Ghash.io  currently has to crush the price, even if they only have the power to utilize it ONCE.

Do central banks like Bitcoin? How much would they be willing to pay to crush it's reputation and price just before the bank bail-ins are announced and set it back 1 year +?

A small group of people having this power is the antithesis of why Bitcoin was created.

Do you just follow people around the forum posting things like "you are an idiot" or "you are ignorant" to increase your post count and get money from the dice sponsor? I just clicked your last post, if it was my sponsorship program I would suspend your pay. Just because in the terms and conditions it says you cannot get away with saying "great post" and "thanks" doesnt make it acceptable to just go round posting "idiot" "ignorant" and "stupid".

Just a thought

First off that is far from a crash. $50 down when the price is ~$940 is small. Now how can you tell that the volume is from panic sellers or overstock selling off their bitcoins? That is what caused the downturn and spike in volume.

It was enough of a selloff to prompt a rapid press release:

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg1zczsg2014-01-09zeg2014-01-09ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zvzcv

https://twitter.com/cex_io/status/421334549726244864

LTC is an alternative until that company (Alpha -- 'something') comes out with an ASIC for LTC.  Hopefully, they were just talking nonsense and can't do it until a few years.

Well, there is an alternative: LTC.

What I think is there should be no ASICs too.

Also, no one pool should have more than 10%

Even 20% is way too high for one pool

For my money, this story isn't getting nearly enough attention.

Everyone is all up in arms about Ghash. But that's only part of the story. The fact is that for quite a while now over 50% of the hashing power is controlled by very few people. Bitcoin's hashing is quite centralized, and this is a huge issue for me. Bitcoin is supposed to be decentralized in essence. Yet one of the primary functions is effectively centralized.

I don't see what difference does it make that Ghash is ramping down, or that people are moving away from Ghash. They're just moving their power from one pool to another. The end result is exactly the same. The hashing power is controlled by the same few individuals.

Maybe that wasn't as clear as it could have been.

If pools could grow indefinitely without consequence, then some of them, sooner or later, are going to try to monopolize the hashing power.

That is a bad thing.

If we assume pools operators and the miners who supply their hashing power are it to make money, then one very powerful disincentive for them to grow excessively is if their size causes adverse effects on the exchange rate.

That doesn't save you from an attacker with infinite dollars to spend who doesn't care about generating a positive ROI, but it does protect the network for lesser threats.

So when headlines appear about a pool getting too large cause a large selloff in the markets followed by rapid action by that pool to correct the situation it tells me the system is working.

I just want to apologise to justusranvier, read some of his posts and he's clearly a much smarter guy than me.

This situation just got me worked up & I over-reacted.  

I have to agree. The only good thing is an evenly distributed network. I approve of you looking for light in darkness but youre trying to turn shit into caviar.