Topic: We're not going anywhere, until the 51% question is answered - page 2. (Read 6400 times)

This thread will resurface like clockwork.

However, OP has a valid point: this is an issue that needs to be addressed before bitcoin transitions from a novelty-payment scheme, to a globally utilized financial tool.

It does look scary. I do not understand why GHash.IO owners will not take some action to curb this? It is also against their interest, they are miners, why do they contribute to eroding trust in btc?

Time for the 51% question to be answered?
https://blockchain.info/pools?timespan=24hrs
GHash.IO over 50%.

It's time for more decentralized mining pools like P2Pool to be written and adopted. Perhaps somebody will write a new protocol which fixes whatever is unattractive in p2pool and adds the benefits of stratum.

*golf clap*

Well said. For the government types to know all the publics holdings and transactions, the public has to give that information. I don't think the public will want to do that. They will bring forward the sacred "no".

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Exactly, and same as this statement, it is just as true that the NSA/government is only as powerful and relevant as the people allow it to be. People have been so conditioned by this evil empire as a single organism like "god" - with the same sort of power, all knowing, all seeing, all powerful, so any time they hear about the government doing this or that, they freak the fuck out like somebody got god all up in a tizzy and now the fire and brimstone fireworks are coming and we're all going to be punished for disobeying the great and powerful Oz.

In real life, there is no god government, no "illuminati" crap...there are only individuals making up agencies in a larger network of other agencies.  It's not a single entity that controls the world. It's a lot of clusterfucked smaller agencies with the advantage of having a system that is so fucking ridiculously filled with red tape and loop holes that no single individual or even chain of command even knows the whole system inside out. It's all just PEOPLE at the end of the day. It looks spooky only because there are so many channels to deal with it's overwhelming...and it looks like genius to the outsider being victimized by it. They got this sewn up to where we *can't* comply even when we truly want to...they've made us all slaves. We surrender.

No. In real life they don't have any centralized control either, the one arm has no fucking clue what any other arm is doing, and one arm's rules conflict with some other arm and nobody can get shit accomplished because there's no end to the run around. This is NOT by design of some brilliant 300 year old secret cartel else they'd have been murdered in their sleep already.

This is a result of PEOPLE not being capable of large scale concentrated coordinated efforts. Plain and simple.

Small groups yes, but THE GOVERNMENT or THE NSA is not an entity. It's just a large number of PEOPLE with conflicting ideals, goals, rules and red tape that make it such a clusterfuck of horse shit, nobody has time to deal with the overwhelming string of endless nonsense from one branch to the next.

The NSA isn't the spy god in the shadows. It's just PEOPLE getting other PEOPLE to give them information. If the other people decided not to, the NSA would grind to a halt and look like as much of a joke as the pope looks these days. They're only as powerful as other people ALLOW. Most of the success of the NSA has come directly from the reality other people are lazy and unwittingly making accessing them easy. When they wise up and start implementing various blocking security, the NSA loses enormous power...same for any other branch of the government.

Bottom line with all this fear mongering on here...if the NSA *could* do it, if any wealthy billionaire *could* do it, why HAVEN'T THEY done it already? Bitcoin's been around going on 6 years or so right? The more time passes, the less bitcoin are mined, so it'd have been far more worth their effort to pull this early on...but they didn't.

A lot of the fear mongers on this issue don't seem to properly understand MEMG. I'm not even remotely pretending I fully understand the 51% attack in entirety but I do understand it enough through reading more on it to know that MEMG applies in this case making it unlikely.

MEMG = Minimum Effort, Maximum Gain

Anyone with significant resources to successfully implement a 51% attack would not even remotely near a break even point in gains, and would then be blocked and obsolete as the responders took control. Nobody who is capable of making the money required to obtain these sorts of resources is stupid and irresponsible enough to pose that sort of risk to their OWN financial means. Their goal is making money, not losing it. For them to spend thousands of dollars in resources for a momentary minimal gain is insanely stupid...maximum effort for minimum, short lived temporary low gain that doesn't even provide a recovering of their investment.

That's WHY nobody would actually DO it...just because they CAN do it doesn't mean it's going to happen anymore than any one of you CAN stand in front of a speeding bullet train and potentially survive and sue the train company for damages and make a million dollars you'll be forking over to a hospital the rest of your life...but only a dumbass would actually DO it.

And if one dumbass does do it, it's not bringing down the train companies, the medical institutions, or the legal profession. It's just weeding out the next winner of the Darwin Awards.

Hello rocks, I quoted you because I believed what you were saying. I also agree with what you wrote above as well. I do think people would simple hash at another pool. Seems pretty easy to do. Even some manipulation would cause the big miners to protect their investment.

And also, I do not think ghash would try anything malicious. They have too much going for them with their cex fees 

It doesn't matter if deepbit topped out at 80% or 55% or 45%.

The main point is that that a large-ish pool has not been an issue in the past and won't be today either because: 1) it is not in a pool's interest and 2) any attempts are highly public and would result in the majority of your subscriber base immediately leaving.

If today's largest pool made something as simple as a 2 block re-org that invalidated any transactions, their hashrate would drop to near zero within days.

Again, a pool is only as strong as the trust individuals place in it. With a public ledger this trust is not blind but checked and verified constantly...

Also I am fairly certain GHASH.IO doesn't have 50% of the hashrate.  The 1 day chart can be very misleading.

Lets pretend a pool, pool x has 40.3% of the hashrate.  This means that in 24 hours it should solve 58 of the 144 blocks.  The network has no way of knowing how much hashrate pool X has, only how many blocks it solves.  The problem is that the variance even over 24 hours can vary significantly.  Lets look at the probabilities the pool will find more than 58 blocks per day when looking at a 1 day and 4 day period.


The first thing you will notice is there is only a 6% probability, that the pool will produce the exactly the 58 blocks expected in one day.  That is the only time the computed hashrate will reflect its actual hashrate.  When a pool does better than expected miners call that luck so you using that terminology the pool will be lucky, solve 59+ blocks and thus appear to have more hashrate, about 47% of the time.  It will also be unlucky, solve 57 or less blocks, and thus appear to have less hashrate 47% of the time. 

Even variances of 25% or more aren't that rare in a one day period.  This hypothetical pool, which remember never has anything other than exactly 40.3% of the global hashrate, will have a 3% probability of appearing to have 51%+ of the network hashrate.  This means that by only looking at the last 24 hours, the pool will appear to have 51% of the hashrate about once a month.  Looking at a 4 day window reduces the probability that you are just getting excited about variance.  It will on average only show a variance of 10% once every two months and will only show a variance of more than 20% once every five years and will only show a variance of more than 25% about once a century.  An even longer period is better over 2016 blocks there is only a 3% chance the pool will deviate by more than 5% (will appear as 38% to 42% of the hashrate 97% of the time).

Why did I pick 40.3% for this "pool x"?
https://blockchain.info/pools?timespan=4days
http://blockorigin.pfoe.be/chart.php

Thanks for clearing that up. I did quote that from someone else (and I was not around when deepbit had 50+%). It would make sense that the same people would be nervous about that (similar to ghash now). 

There was never a time when a single pool had 80% of the hashrate.   At one time deepbit did exceed 50% briefly and there was similar gnashing of teeth and wailing about the end times for Bitcoin.  Of course some miners moved and deepbit lost popularity to other pools and life went on.  The reality is being the #1 pool is a license to print money.  The higher their hashrate the more their fees.   Betray the public trust and it is gone forever.  There is nothing you could possible double spend that would make losing that a good idea.

Or China could officially 'ban' Bitcoin.

But sure yeah let's believe the government will spend multi-millions to destroy our monopoly fun.

Well, I was reading somewhere about one of the older pools deep something that had 80% of the hash rate at one time (I am vaguely quoting something I read on here so don't hold me to it)

What they basically said was that if people saw any double spending, people would move to different pools. Look at the charts now, I am sure people would switch to lesser pools to unite against majority pools or something of this nature.

Again, we have not been through a malicious attack (double spends that were confirmed etc) so there is no telling what would happen.
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https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ghashio-reached-45-407217
edit, i read it here
last comment on first page by rocks and I quote:

"I admit I don't like this given GhashIO's history.

But when I first got into bitcoin, Deepbit (remember them) was 80% of the hash rate and they had 80%for a long time.

Deepbit at 80% didn't destroy the network because: 1) that is not in a pool's interest and 2) any attempts are highly public and would result in the majority of your subscriber base immediately leaving.

A pool is only as strong as the trust individuals place in it."

I agree with his statement

If they desired, the Chinese government could order the manufacturers to produce any quantity they wanted.  In China, everyone just does as the authorities want.  So if the day comes that China actually wants to harm Bitcoin, they will have all the hashrate they want.  Sure, it can be fixed after the fact.  But why not be prepared?  Why not fix this before the fit hits the shan?  Why not shore up investor confidence?  Speculation is just as much (if not more) about PR and image as it is about fundamentals.

Those ASIC miners are being sold like a hearing-aid.. Doesn't cost much to manufacture but sells at a high price

Cause manufacturers would sell at a loss, right?

What I currently find amazing is that the devs feel that "dust" was more important than a pool having X amount of hashing power.
Where a pool can deny dust or accept it but a pool won't deny extra hashing power.
I don't get it.

In response to the people above. No it will not take 100 million to buy up the hashrate. It might not take 20 million to buy the majority of hardware to mine. This is because the people who make the asics chips (Taiwan etc) can either themselves or sell to others to hash. They can sell at a fraction of what knc or something sells to the public.

Maybe they don't want to fix this YET.... because they're reserving this for the future price dip