Topic: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion - page 30426. (Read 26712869 times)

i understand this much, that there are a lot of people who have interests that simply don't intersect the interests of the bitcoin community, who are involved by proxy in this or other ways. what i don't see, is how that would translate into an interest to sabotage the project.

while the ramifications of their actions might set the stage for that particular pool to sabotage the project, there still needs to be a malicious party to actually carry out the act. what you're saying is perhaps we cannot avoid a 51% situation in the short term because the incentives to prevent this are broken, but if GHash won't try to attack the blockchain, while the pool will become a target for anyone who does, i don't think anything terrible will happen immediately, and hopefully the savvy members of the community will have enough time to orchestrate a reorganization of the mining sector.

even if the obliviousness of speculators involved in cex.io really does result in a tragedy of the commons scenario, the returns are self-limiting. if they threaten the integrity of the whole project, no one profits, and the scheme collapses. i doubt bitcoin will be utterly destroyed, or even close, at this point, and so the worst that could happen would be a short period of blockchain instability that will be resolved after the panic dissolves the mining majority.

that being said, i really do not feel i know enough about the technical side of bitcoin to be sure that my understanding is accurate in this case. do the above arguments sound reasonable? from what i understand, we as a community should be able to handle this with little difficulty.

--arepo

Don't be so sure about that. The problem is Wall Street and the mindset that it has spread.

Right now speculators are buying mining shares on cex.io. They don't care if they are actually overpaying for their shares because they don't give a shit about the NPV of those shares - all they care about is being able to sell higher than the bought (greater fool theory).

A lot of money is being thrown into Bitcoin mining by people who neither know nor care what they are actually doing.

I know, which makes me more confident about this community , the sub Reddit looks like this now

http://thenextweb.com/asia/2014/01/09/singapore-bucks-the-trend-and-welcomes-bitcoin-laying-out-tax-rules-for-the-virtual-currency/#!rM905

good news after good news

tragedy of the commons maybe

in all seriousness, i do recognize that it's a major issue, but i'm confident in the bitcoin community as a whole and the incentives built into the protocol. there is far too much at stake for miners to really be that oblivious and shortsighted to simply not reorganize themselves in order to SAVE BITCOIN (!), and even if they don't, as many have pointed out, outside of some third-party conspiracy against the project, GHASH isn't going to sabotage their own reputation and profits -- the incentives just don't line up.

that being said, the alternating waves of panic and euphoria in this thread are almost frightening in their magnitude...

--arepo

ah ! no, the panic thing is so overused, no one will fall for it again, people think smarter today .... but seriously forget about speculation, how the F$#%& people keep buying into CEX.IO and others even join the pool ? does this new miners even spend time to get educated about the mechanism and concept of Bitcoin's protocol ?

lol   

Explanation

well, before everybody started flipping a shit, the picture looked like this:


but now, who knows? right? GHASH COULD BE DOUBLE SPENDING AS WE SPEAK dun dun dunnn...

am i doing it right, guys? the whole panic thing?

--arepo

Remember, 40% of the hashrate makes you $1.2M+ a day, at today's exchange rate. You don't screw with the currency that is bringing in that much money. ghash.io are also merge mining Namecoin with it's 1B difficulty, maybe other alts. They could be 50% of Namecoin.

Makes $500,000 in ASIC die fees seem like chump change.

People mining with GHash have a strong incentive to change pools as it approaches 50%. Mass suicide is too stupid a thing for relatively tech-savvy bitcoin mining people to fall into

Yea its looking good at all, but not that much we can do about it..
It will ruin bitcoin if they actually start double spending on a wide scale.

Well, there's always the alts that don't rely on mining.

True, but thats a very longterm thinking.

That fear doesn't hold good for any crypto currency does it , what is going to save the alts from same thing not happening again.

I wonder if fear of the 51% attack will actually make people just on alts

Last hour 38%

https://blockchain.info/pools?timespan=1hrs

because they can...

probably just panic