Topic: Ghash.io has voluntary to suspend parts of service! - page 3. (Read 5377 times)

gmaxwell, thanks for the posts on these matters.


It seems to me there is not really a process to deal with this or an understanding what this entails. Even if there were 3 pools with "only" 33% hashpower each, how should I know they are three separate entities? Also, isn't this also about how the rules (source) can be changed? The process is entirely opaque, so even if 100 people who are experts trust some mechanism doesn't mean 1 million people who don't understand it should. For example for me trust depends on statements of core developers to some degree. I don't trust statements of mining pools, nor should anybody else.

I believe that there several flaws in proof of work and the way the consensus works and it is now showing more clearly. There is no way to enforce certain mining policies. One would need some basic protocol which ensures proof of work is forced to be distributed. In the end it would be much better to have a broad based consensus of what the rules of the network are, and a protocol how rules can be changed. After all it has to be acknowledged that some properties are set in stone. It is my understanding that economic majority and the way the code is secured and distributed is showing its limits. Cycles are always transferable no matter what you do. And there is  no channel for how users of the network can make decisions what rules they want to follow.

Didn't work on my Jupiter. And sure as hell didn't work on Avalon for a long time. Not fud, try it, I hope it works on more. And I really hope it works on Neptune. But 50% of asics isn't exactly working, yet.

I love p2pool and used it for a very long time. I even had a public node for a very long time. It's not fud, I'm more mad I couldn't use it with my Jupiter. I almost even all ran it at half ghs just to support p2pool. That's not fud. Fud is if I said oh I had to use ghash.

Fuck no, I never touched stupid cexio. I even use the smallest pool possible, bitparking. And it's amazing. I still even run my p2pool node in peer mode to help the network (at least I think it does).

Tldr: New asics better support p2pool, not the other way around. And use the smallest pools possible. Those big payouts are exciting like solo mining.

Please be specific or it's just spreading FUD:

I can personally attest P2Pool works great on Avalon, it also works great on Bitmain Antminer (w/ firmware update, the original firmware is buggy).

I know from others that it works fine on BFL and it works on Asicminer blades so long as the +1 option is added to the username.

P2pool barely works on some asics otherwise it's my #1 choice. #2 is bitparking. #3 is slush.

Stupid newbies put us in this predicament.

Pooling can't be limited or banned because there is no admissions control on mining. Everyone can mine without asking permission, and if it were otherwise it would be a point of centralization.
There is, P2Pool, which is a fully decentralized mining pool based on the same technology as Bitcoin. Unfortunately a lot of miners operated under an incorrect understanding of mining where they believe their income is proportional to the size of the pool that they are on based under a misunderstanding of mining as a race instead of as a poisson process and so they try to mine at the biggest pool. As a result we've seen a continual churn where a large pool gets a lucky run and appears larger than it is on some charts and then people flock over and it bloats up, then people freak out.

The fact of the matter is that "51%" is hardly more concerning than 40%. If a party controlling 40% hashpower tries, they'll successfully reverse 6 confirms 50% of the time. That someone could control so much hashpower by compromising a single party or system is thoroughly outside of our security model, even if it isn't quite "51%".

In any case P2Pool suffers for four reasons: (0) It's moderately small, so none of the people who misunderstand mining as a race will use it. (1) It's poorly misunderstood and frequently hit with FUD: people saying it has poor income (actually no, its all time income is 107% of expectation) or high orphans (actually, in the last several months it has had something like 0.1% orphans, an order of magnitude below other pools) (2) it takes more effort to setup, you have to run a Bitcoin node with it, (3) it takes more resources to run—  there are people with tens of thousands of dollars of mining gear running it off a crappy flaky raspberry pi— it makes no sense, but thats how it is P2pool needs a reasonably competent (e.g. strong laptop or a desktop machine) hosting the miners to really work well.

Related to (3) is that P2Pool has no snazzy marketing or slick webpage. There are other pools with pool-fee income over half a million dollars per month that can afford some snazzy UI work, but P2Pool is a volunteer open source work funded by donations when its funded at all.

There are _other_ ways to to do more decentralized mining.  The GBT protocol offered by Eligius and a few other pools was intended as a start for making the classical centralized pooling models more decentralized but it has not been widely adopted. If it were you could have things like miners generating their own work and only using a centralized (and potentially distributed) pool to coordinate sharing payouts... but there is basically no active work on that right now.

Maybe bitcoin itself shouldn't be regulated just the mining pools.

Highly unlikely, if it was an enemy of bitcoin then why would they create an exchange to sell off their hashing power and make money? I am going to be honest with you, bitcoin today has very few enemies that would like to completely destroy it, for one of them to come into the space create to profitable businesses would make no sense. They are contributing to the economy making it stronger. So for it to be an enemy of bitcoin is extremely unlikely, they release a plan of how they going to give back hashing rate and stop growing an enemy of bitcoin wouldn't do that.

Plot twist: They ARE the bitcoin dev team.

Why aren't pools just banned?

Or limits put on pools?

Or another solution provided?

Why is everyone flailing their arms like this is some monster who could grow out of control?

We are humans.  There's a bitcoin dev deam.  Why doesn't someone just fix the problem?

Weird...

Fuck them and Fuck anyone who ever used them

This is about 10 hours old (long before this thread was started):
http://qz.com/165300/no-bitcoin-isnt-about-to-be-taken-over-by-a-massive-cartel/

After Ghash.io’s large stake came to light on bitcoin discussion boards, members of the pool started flocking away, reducing the pool’s share of mining to 38% over the course of just seven hours. This is just more and stronger proof that the system is self-correcting—such mining pool exoduses have happened in the past.

It seems correct according to blockchain: https://blockchain.info/pools

if ghash.io is private persons or companies that are in for the profit there is not much to worry, i agree. But we don't know that.

edit:
i just checked the stats again and they lost another 2% and are now at 38%. Let's hope this thread becomes obsolete soon.

Anonymous people want to make money too, I am just saying they run two business that make a lot of money why would they want to end it over a 51% attack.

Didn't saw it this way, that's a bit scary ! 

I do think the same way, it's not in their interest to reach 51%.

Exactly in the wrong hands, look at this way, if Ghash did pull off a 51% attack, they be hitting two parts of their income very had. I doubt they would want to do this. They rather probably get the bitcoin so saying they are wrong hands is untrue. This didn't do anything to the price, this is normal ups and downs. If it was down to ~$700 I would say it affected it but it isn't. It wouldn't render bitcoin unusable we could just switch the hashing if need be, and hard fork. People weren't panic at all, I been watching this since it broke if it was a panic sell it would have happened and we be down ~$700 which it isn't showing that people aren't scared by this and shouldn't. It is FUD.

as was said in another thread before: btc has enough enemies. The pool could be operarted by a large bank or a government. We don't know. There are entities out there that would not care about a relativeley small financial loss just to stop this whole thing.
We can not tell for sure if ghash.io is malicious to btc or not since we apparently don't know who is opperating it.

i think if the news of overstock-implementation didn't come out today we could already be at the 700-range.

Are the identities of the owners of ghash.io known? I suspect they operate as anoynmous as everybody else in this environment. (I could be wrong since i didn't do an in-depth research about them) Anonymous players are not trustworthy at all. Why should they be? It could be just about anybody operating those pools.

51% attack doesn't mean bitcoin is centralized, it has nothing to do with that. Remember a 51% if in the wrong hands can allow people to do a double spend attack, that doesn't mean they will do it.

Also most of the larger holders are not freaking out at all. Ghash has already made good about their policy to stop taking more miners and keeping the hash rate below the 51%. Also remember deepbit had this issue, and BTCGuild had this problem and a couple others, this is how the network spreads FUD.

Plus BTC-E isn't a real exchange holds no real volume.

51% in the wrong hands can render btc unusable. The risk alone is enough to depress prices long before those 51% are reached in my views. I want to see prices go up. I made this thread because i recognized a stronger than usual dip with all that talk about ghash.io. So for me there is no doubt this issue has already affected price of btc. People were about to panic when the overstock-news just prevented a crash. Well, just my subjective impressions of course.
We don't have to reach consensus on this matter. I just wanted to voice my concerns and petition ghash.io to take this matter more seriously and take a step back to secure their own source of income for the long time. They should admit to themselves they expanded much faster than the network in general and are now reaching an unhealthy level of expansion that is actually a real threat to this whole btc-experiment. They can not ask people to just trust them. That is not how it works.