Topic: Surely this isn't a 51% attack on bitcoins, right? (Read 5468 times)
In statistics variance=(volatility)^2, but colloquially the two can be interchanged.
It is my understanding that Ghash's count towards blocks found either solo or at a pool equally well.
This. Being in a pool doesn't solve a block faster. The only disadvantage to solo mining is volatility. If you are in a pool you STILL have the exact same volatility in block solving times (as an individual) the pool merely smooths the financial aspect of that volatility.
...you mean variance, right ?
Yeah variance is likely better word choice. Pretty sure the words are interchangeable though. right?
It is my understanding that Ghash's count towards blocks found either solo or at a pool equally well.
This. Being in a pool doesn't solve a block faster. The only disadvantage to solo mining is volatility. If you are in a pool you STILL have the exact same volatility in block solving times (as an individual) the pool merely smooths the financial aspect of that volatility.
...you mean variance, right ?
It is my understanding that Ghash's count towards blocks found either solo or at a pool equally well.
This. Being in a pool doesn't solve a block faster. The only disadvantage to solo mining is variance. The only advantage to a pool is reduced variance. If you are in a pool you STILL have the exact same variance in your individual block solving times the pool merely smooths the financial aspect of that variance.
Question, is it better to point small (~2 Ghash) guns at a operating pool during times like this, or is it better to go solo?
If the case of a widespread DDOS attack, mining solo is better so that you can relay transactions, taking load off of the pools. I am currently reading the forum instead of geting some CPU miners up. If the attack continues, I may have two (relatively power hungry) CPU miners at two separate IP addresses.
I have been planning on setting up a netbook CPU miner drawing 12Watts (for the near term), but have not set that up yet. The other CPU miners I have available probably draw 100W each. I am also concerned about bandwidth use and have not set up Bandwidth monitoring on my end yet.
I like you conspiracy theories Deslok! Plus, less difficulty is hard to hate.
Question, is it better to point small (~2 Ghash) guns at a operating pool during times like this, or is it better to go solo? My line of thinking is it's better to be in a pool because you'll contribute to solving a block faster, and that's what effectively hinders any 51% bs. Going solo with anything less than 1 Ghash seems wasteful of precious block solving time.
It is my understanding that Ghash's count towards blocks found either solo or at a pool equally well.
It's possible this is not a "51% attack" but something much simpler, bringing down a pool as large as deepbit, slush or btc guild this close to a difficulty change will 1, decrease the number of new blocks found slowing the flow of new blocks into exchanges theoretically temporarily stabilizing the prices(this would happen at any point a major pool went offline however) and 2 cause the difficulty drop to be longer than normal by affecting the blocks/hour ratio even if done for a day this would cause a greater than predicted difficulty drop and allow said attacker to mine more coins than prior during the next cycle
I like you conspiracy theories Deslok! Plus, less difficulty is hard to hate.
Question, is it better to point small (~2 Ghash) guns at a operating pool during times like this, or is it better to go solo? My line of thinking is it's better to be in a pool because you'll contribute to solving a block faster, and that's what effectively hinders any 51% bs. Going solo with anything less than 10 Ghash seems wasteful of precious block solving time.
BTW, I'm at BTC Guild for now.
https://rfcpool.com/ still working just fine 
This is exactly why concentrating too much hash power in a few pools is not a good idea.
Better to mine at a smaller mid-sized pool
Better to mine at a smaller mid-sized pool
No, it's basically the same. With such massive botnet power there's no problem with flooding tens of smaller pools. Now attackers don't do that because 70% hashrate is on three pools, but they'll change attack vector if hashrate distribution will change.
This is exactly why concentrating too much hash power in a few pools is not a good idea.
Better to mine at a smaller mid-sized pool
Better to mine at a smaller mid-sized pool
That is what I was thinking. I believe we are running at about 5 blocks per hour and the retarget is about 1.5m and only about 100 blocks away so if this keeps up long enough the difficulty may drop below 1.5m.
It's possible this is not a "51% attack" but something much simpler, bringing down a pool as large as deepbit, slush or btc guild this close to a difficulty change will 1, decrease the number of new blocks found slowing the flow of new blocks into exchanges theoretically temporarily stablizing the prices(this would happen at any point a major pool went offline however) and 2 cause the difficulty drop to be longer than normal by affecting the blocks/hour ratio even if done for a day this would cause a greater than predicted difficulty drop and allow said attacker to mine more coins than prior durng the next cycle
BCE has stated that he has a lot of Bitcoins so he has no plans to mess with the Bitcoin network. But I think it is a good idea to introduce at least one new alt coin chain per week in order to keep him busy killing them off - sort of like the whack-a-mole game
BTW I am "doing my part" and turning on all of my idle miners and running them "just in case". Don't know if my piddly amount will help but there you go.
BTW I am "doing my part" and turning on all of my idle miners and running them "just in case". Don't know if my piddly amount will help but there you go.
Clearly just a preview from BitcoinExpress of what he has in store for us if the price falls to low and miners drop out and the network is weakened.
BUY BUY BUY !!!
BUY BUY BUY !!!
O well I have decided to spread my hashing power between the big three plus my favorite small pool (BTC Mine). I have been monitoring them and they are up and down and up and ... But on the average I am hashing at one or more at all times. Good enough for today. They will eventually get tired of wasting their power on the DDoS and go away.
Well now that is interesting. I have connected my miners to Slush, BTC Guild and Deepbit and they are all three down as of now, so I moved on to a smaller pool. I am monitoring the "big three" and I cannot connect to any of them at this time!
Weird I was kicked off slush but about 30 minutes ago I was able to reconnect and have been able to stay connected. Looks like denial of service is partial?
Spoke to soon. Had to know I was going to jink myself. I can't connect anymore. Blerg. Well I will drop 6GH to solo mining at least for rest of the day.
Well now that is interesting. I have connected my miners to Slush, BTC Guild and Deepbit and they are all three down as of now, so I moved on to a smaller pool. I am monitoring the "big three" and I cannot connect to any of them at this time!
Weird I was kicked off slush but about 30 minutes ago I was able to reconnect and have been able to stay connected. Looks like denial of service is partial?
Well now that is interesting. I have connected my miners to Slush, BTC Guild and Deepbit and they are all three down as of now, so I moved on to a smaller pool. I am monitoring the "big three" and I cannot connect to any of them at this time!
DOSing the major pools isn't what I think of as a "51% attack", but whatever. Whether or not the pools are under attack or not is of little concern to myself. The overall security of the network is not really under threat, since 10 Terahashes per second isn't a mark reachable by any known network or supercomputer. This does highlight the risks to the bitcoin network at large associated with pool mining. Concentrating the mining to a single server for the purpose of income stability also creates central points of failure/attack. I don't mine in pools for this exact reason, and don't think anyone with any substantial hashing ability should do so. 10K small lights are harder to shoot out than a dozen really big ones.
No but if you had say 4TH of computing power knocking (or trying to) the largest pools off the network could be a precursor. The 3 largest pools have ~6TH combined. The 5 largest pools have ~7TH combined. Disrupting the network softens it up for a 51% attack.
Still it looks like operator of BTC Guild thinks this happened because he pissed off a botnet operator (by blocking him from his pool)
I don't think it is something you did. Slush indicates his pool is under attack and deep bit users are indcating connectivity issues.
I'm referring to the fact that this all happened a few minutes after I posted that I had submitted a giant list of IPs that I had been collecting from the botnet miners the last few days. Could very easily be the childish mentality of these "hackers": "Oh yeah, well I'm going to take my ball and go home, but first I'm going to pop your ball."
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