Topic: Ghash.io has voluntary to suspend parts of service! - page 2. (Read 5377 times)

Never in my entire life, in any movie, book or forum, have I ever seen or heard, & I doubt whether it would be possible to find, even if I scoured the depths of the universe, a statement that is as unbelievably f*cking stupid as the one above.  

To anyone who contributes resources or works for a mining pool that controls more than 10% of the network you are as evil as the most oppressive government agencies & central banks in the world combined and your stupidity is only eclipsed by the person that wrote the above statement.

The miners do not "know" what they are mining. The pool just send them jobs and the miners return the result (shares) and get pay (there are many different payment schemes), but most easy to understand is Pay-per-share, you get a fix amount of santoshi for each submitted share. The pool owner can use the hashing power they are in control of to any anything they like and most miners wouldn't even notice that they are not mining the honest block chain as long as they are being pay for the jobs.

btw. it do not require 51% of the hashing power to execute a "51% attack" - its a matter of statistic. e.g. 40% hashing power can also perform double spend, the success rate are just less. GHash.IO has definitely the hashing power needed to perform double spend attacks, the would loos mining time, but as long as you "cheat" yourself to more BTC than you have to pay the miners, then can it be a profitable business. A scheme for a double attack is to send a bet to Santoshi Dice, if the bet win, fine, take the money, if the bet loose, use the hashing power to confirm the transaction to have gone elsewhere.

This may be a dumb question since I am not a miner but who is required to execute a 51% attack in a pool?  Does it require all participants of the pool to reverse transactions, ect. or can anyone or a small group within the pool or only the pool operators execute the attack? 

If pools growing too large causes the exchange rate to crash that's a good thing.

Fear of their investment rapidly losing value is one of the economic incentives for pools to behave well.

I agree cease and desist with the FUD already.

We don't have to know them, we don't have to trust them. They don't have to be 'good people'. The beauty of the Bitcoin system is NOT in the impossibility of a double-spend or other attack. The beauty is in the fact that it is ALWAYS financially better for hashing power to play by the rules.

Yes, a powerful pool could cause problems:

1) They could slow or interrupt transactions.  The result would be an immediate (and likely permanent) migration of miners away from their pool. There is no financial benefit to this.  In fact, if their actions erode Bitcoin confidence, they have succeeded in devaluing their owned hardware.

2) They could execute a double-spend.  If they're doing this with the goal of acquiring fiat, they're opening themselves to litigation.  The additional results of this would be a (likely temporary) loss of confidence in Bitcoin, and once again a (this time certainly permanent) migration of owners away from their pool.  That would have to be one HELL of a large double-spend to be worth it.  Unfortunately, the larger the double-spend, the more likely they will be to find motivated and financed litigation coming after them.

Note also that either of these problems automatically self-correct with the migration of users away from their pool.  Only one of those double-spends would exist on the permanent transaction chain.  The injured party sues, and the pool has gained nothing from this, and lost their user-base.

I'm all for keeping pools under 50%, but not to prevent these sorts of attacks.  All the same attacks that are possible at 51% are also possible at 40% or even less.  The ONLY difference is that they would take more time to execute, and would self-correct without user migration.  

The reason I would like to see pools comfortably stay under 50% is entirely psychological.  Due to the FUD about the "magic" 51%, an overly large pool gives Bitcoin detractors something concrete to point at, and that could slow adoption.

Their press release says they won't implement a fee, but honestly, they should.  They could keep it very small -- maybe 0.25% or something like that.  It would deter relatively few people but probably enough, and would also them money.

I would seriously welcome this and join both sites just not to have all of my eggs in the same proverbial basket.

Cex.io being the only viable option when it comes to trading GH/s (which in turn makes them the most appealing to "mine" if you have no hardware) is quite scary.

Thats right, it only hides it.

They can switch it back any time they like.

Within the next couple months CEX.io will have at least two competitors that I'm aware of, and that's just in Austin.

Right, so an option to reduce the pool hashrate to directing the hardware at another pool at the hardware owners discretion doesn't solve the problem? That's an interesting train of thought.

Personally, I'm surprised some of the other major pools didn't think of doing what CEX.io did earlier in terms of hosting hardware and allowing some to purchase shares in them. I mean, FFS, you'd think some of them would've noticed this earlier and gone "Hey, that seems like a good idea!" and implemented similar features in order to get more people involved with their own pools and help to limit the risk of a single pool having 51% or greater hashing of the entire network.

I seriously question the lack of foresight and initiative amongst the Bitcoin collective at times, I really do.

That's what BTCGuild has historically done when they have reached dangerous quotas. They have taken up the fees.

Seems like smart pool operators could take advantage of this incorrect understanding by raising their fees as their fraction of the hashing power increases.

That would dampen the positive feedback effect of the dumb miners flocking to the largest pool just because it's the largest.

Actually that's what they should have been doing all along. Price signals really do work better than rationing - when a pool is attracting more hashing power than it wants rather than block new connections it should just raise prices.

Mice cried, were pricked, but all continued to guzzle cactus bitcoin 

So nobody even gains anything if they stay in Ghash?

That should make it easy for people to switch to another pool.

Why? That's regulation which is kinda against the whole idea of Bitcoin...

This does not solve the problem, it only hides it, which is even worse. 

+1

I totally agree.

I remember when I used BTC guild with my FPGA farm in april-may 2013, when BTC Guild got "too big", they reacted with increasing the fee, that caused miners to move to other pool, and they reduced they hashrate, very responsible of them.

Personally I have moved some of my funds into altcoin, because of the "Ghash.IO risk", I might be paranoid but I find LTC more safe than BTC right now.

This Ghash thing is scary as hell.

I see them as enemy's of BTC. They have to raise fee's to get rid of the newbie miners.

Yes, they make a little money with mining, but this is peanuts compared to the money they can make to short BTC and use scare tactics. Or some government/banks can offer them a few billion to destroy BTC.


Right now I put my faith in big BTC holders to set up miningpower to compete with those motherfuckers and keep their stash safe.

You can still perform double spend attack with less than 51% control of the network. With e.g. 45% is there a good change to be successful with a double spend. However with 51% will you statistically be sure to be successful over time.