In a free market economy, u cant expect the leader to step down. The competitors should step up.
Or it should be regulated by authority (in this case bitcoin protocol itself). It should be possible to force anyone from amasing hash power like that on protocol side. It's not Ghas that should fix this, devs are ones that need to secure network on protocol level.
You can't just blacklist an entire pool.
You cant blacklist, but u can cease its mining power programmatically with protocol level modification. Please read the proposition =>
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/can-we-change-the-mining-protocol-650778But you talk about leaving it at 49%. That's still way too dangerous.
It can be set to any "max" level...even "only p2p" can be forced on protocol level.
Best and only way to protect network is portocol, not hardware.
Exactly and I dont understand why 49% is at risk, though its just a max variable that the community can decide upon. But whether a protocol level modification is possible and be accepted is a bigger question. I believe except for GHash.IO all other miners will accept it. Probably the independent participants at Ghash.IO too.
51% means that double spending would be at a 100% success rate. You could still endanger Bitcoin in such a way with 49% as well.
I'll again repeat myself and say that Ghash could keep all the hashing power if they were to split to independent pools.
It can further be used to lock down addresses by not processing transactions that are made from that address and by refusing all block that include transactions from that address.
Other miners would then be faced with either having to lose their mining reward (because GHash.io ignores their block and just builds a longer chain which will overrule the block with the transaction in question, or having to not include any transactions of addresses GHash.io says they won't build blocks on.
Ofc, with miners often being heavily invested in mining hardware, they would always want their reward and therefore obey GHash.io's rules (in order to at least get something out of their mining investment).
That would lead to the network adapting to rules set by GHash.io rather quickly and therefore making it impossible to switch back even after they lose their has dominance (because who wants to step out and have his blocks refused by the network first?)
It's a dangerous situation and I do not like it =/
