Bitcoin Forum

As I'm speaking BTCGuild has 43 percent od the network. This is not healthy for the Bitcoin ecosystem at all. Please don't mine there

This is like the boy who cried "Wolf". even if they were at 51%, they wouldn't do anything bad. Besides, they would have to maintain that level for a while to be a threat. Briefly hitting it means nothing.

Mine where you like, for the reasons you like, it is a free world. :o

I actually believe it's the opposite. It doesn't matter if they do own 51% of the network or not.

IIRC, a double spend attack would require a malicious pool op to get 6 blocks in a row. You don't actually need 51% of the network, its just that 51% or more of the network guarantees a 100% success. Even 35% of the network (with some good luck) can do a double spend. This is where BTCGuild is at right now.

It's visible only in a purely abstract way. Deepbit was frequently "eating its own tail" due to running multiple bitcoin daemons which would end up on competing forks and then load balancing miners between them (if it doesn't do this anymore its only because it doesn't solve enough blocks).

Not a single person in the world noticed this until Luke-Jr, bless his occasionally trolly heart, added code to BFGMiner to refuse to mine when a pool appeared to be forking itself.  But not many people run that code.

Moreover, it's only a very partial solution:  Say the network is on block A,  you don't include the transaction you want to conflict in A. Then then another miner solves A and the network moves on to A+1 but you stay on A. Eventually you solve A'+1+1+1 ... and with some luck reverse the transaction.  Miners never see any self-forking, and so the protection in BFGminer cannot help.

Performing the attack in this way simply constrains when you can start the attack (only right after another pool found a block), it does not reduce the success rate.

A number of years ago your pool delivered earning of something like 40% of expectations for months. A number of people were convinced that you were a thief because of it (that something was subtly broken, or there was some witholding attack seems like a more likely explanation, in my view), but that hasn't inhibited you from having the largest pool by far.

I cannot believe that many people would notice or care about a decline in revenue on the timescale of a single day or two.

Maybe they would. But thats a big maybe to stake the future of Bitcoin on, especially with people trying to open up new markets that allow them to take short positions. A substantial successful attack would dramatically undermine confidence in Bitcoin:  The existence of major hashpower consolations already defeats the security assumptions, but its a theoretical weakness and until an attack happens many don't believe what incredibly shaky ground we are on here.


Control over mining is orthogonal with pooling payments.  There is no reason that a pool couldn't simply hand out coinbase transactions to miners and credit them for any remotely sane looking shares that includes the requested coinbase transaction.   The pool would then only be a consolidation of miners payments and would have no risk for consolidating control of the blockchain consensus. Miners would become miners again, and not just people selling computing services for coin.

The risk that miners would intentionally have some junk transactions that get blocks orphaned would be strictly less than the block withholding risk which cannot be eliminated, as you could still ask miners to occasionally send whole blocks.

Had Satoshi though of this in 2010 I believe we would have a very different world today.

Remind me of: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=12370.0  :D

If anyone tells me that the current hashrate spread is healthy then I don't think we're talking about same system. I don't have anything against Eulethria and I would never accuse him of doing anything wrong. However miners should be smart enough to spread the hashrate more...

They do have high hashrate. But they have responsible owner and only 37% of the network. Still, i would advice people to mine at pools like bitminter who have really little hashrates

The hashrate should spread more. Slush, 50BTC, Eligius, EclipseMC, Bitminter are all good and responsible pools

I just wish that BTCGuild can shut down their getwork to reduce some hashrates. Its bad for bitcoin economy.

Who is MegaBigPower?
http://www.btcguild.com/index.php?page=rankings&section=teams

these guys: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140366.0

Or use a real decentralized solution like P2Pool. Even if 100% would mine there, the network would be perfectly decentralized.
 
Really, it saddens me, that despite claiming different, most miners seem to not care about the Network and can't even live with a bit of variance.

Bitcoin is still in its infancy and miners need to take responsibility to help keep the server secure by spreading out the hashrate.

I mine at deepbit

FUD

There are reasons why people with solo-mining capabilities are using BTCGuild. Simple interface, easy to setup.

What is the benefit of mining with BTCGuild over let's say Elgius?