Bitcoin Forum

I thought every body has to see this post. credit goes to RoadTrain  original post https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=321630.0

I second this. This MUST be looked into immediately,and if found to be true & legitimate, an explanation demanded from ghash.io/cex.io

Oh shit this look so serious if true...

It is interesting how you buy & sell from cex.io. They keep all the bitcoin and control all the Gh. You have to 'withdrawl' BTC.  One interesting quirk, you can setup your workers to autopayout in 0.1BTC increments based on a 'shareholder' concept.

I agree.  Very well worth investigating.

Whether the accusation could be proven or not, I second that it deserves an investigation.

Investigation recommended as well

cex.iohave recently registered as a UK company - could this action (if them) be down to an employee taking advantage?  Seems like the cex.io buiness plan looks profitable - not worth messing with gambling perhaps?

Thoughts?

Taking irreversible actions on unconfirmed transactions is not safe. This is not news.  Big hashpower consolidations are not safe. This is not news.

While I'm sympathetic about losses and don't support theft— it appears that many Bitcoin gambling services are run from places where their legality is probably questionable, and as a result getting help from the courts may not be an option— and even if it is, it's very expensive and takes a long time. Your best bet is to protect yourself by not transacting in a way which is insecure relative to the network that exists today.

The operators of high transaction inefficient gambling services (the ones with two transactions per tiny bet) have many times responded to the Bitcoin community members concerned about their services abusing our common network resources and costing money node operators saying that we should all be thankful for the valuable "test" they are performing and the encouragement it provides to improve the infrastructure. Some parallels could be drawn from people exploiting insecure unconfirmed transaction behavior …

Indeed, a Dice site setup properly wouldn't be vulnerable to this.

(this is not an endorsement of the double spending)

this is serious research required

Can someone explain this to me like a 5yr old please

Sure. Imagine 3 sisters (let's call them the Potters).

Annie owns 1 doll.  Sally owns 1 doll.  Jane owns no dolls.

Now of course, doll ownership in the Potter household is only as good as to when Annie, Sally, Jane, Mom and Dad agrees to who owns what. Annie can't just take Sally's doll, as everyone knows it's not hers and will just restore rightful ownership.


However, Annie comes up with a plan. She makes a bet with Sally at school. She rolls a dice, with the terms that if Sally wins Sally would get Annie's doll when they get home. If Annie wins, she would get Sally's doll.

Let's say Sally is honest but Annie is not. The roll the dice. If Annie happens to win, Sally gives her the doll. They're both happy... well, except for Sally - but they're in agreement at least.

However, if Annie happens to lose, she quickly goes running to Jane and say: "Hey Jane, remember that doll that I have, I can trade it to you for your bottle of Corona". Jane says ok, so then they phone up mom and dad, and say: "Hey mom, Annie's doll now belongs to Jane, and Jane's Corona now belongs to Annie".  Mom and Dad says ok, so now Annie's doll now belongs to Jane, and Annie starts her long journey of Corona addiction that ends with her turning tricks on Hollywood Boulevard until one very unfortunate night with Gary Busey... but more about that at another time.

Meanwhile, Sally gets home and finds that she's not getting Annie's doll. Since everybody else now thinks that Annie doesn't have a doll anymore, and it now belongs to Jane. Sally can complain like she wants, but mom and dad doesn't understand why Sally would make a bet with Annie against a doll that really belongs to Jane. Of course, in real life Sally would now beat up Annie with a baseball bet, which is why a stunt like this works better in BitCoin land than in Vegas (well, except if you cross DPR.).

amazing story hahahaha, you should just add that Annie is Ghash.io and Sally is BetCoin and the parents are the Bitcoin protocol :) which leaves Jane that I cant put anywhere.

I don't believe they are doing this... maybe its one of the employee?

The account that you do the double-spend to.

Jane is also Ghash.io.

Nice story lol, much clearer now - thank you

lets get to the bottom line here, it is not about BetCoin failure, we all agree on that, the whole thing is about someone holding 24% of the network hash power and using this position with bad attention.

it worries me when they get close to 51%, then the question is if they are doing it now, what will they do with 51% and that what matters to me at this point.

what the cumunity can do about it, I guess nothing, they are a private pool , they will be adding more and more power this is no question, in the classic case, miners can always switch to other pools when they feel the threat but what is the solution when some big private pool does this.

Exactly

I'm not sure it's that simple.
BetCoin Dice is currently* a DDoS attack against Bitcoin. GHash.IO's actions here could be construed as a kind of self-defence.

* BetCoin has indicated they will correct this problem eventually.

I really don't understand how can BetCoin or any other service be a threat to Bitcoin, can you please explain it, maybe I was missing something ?

I am not going to defend the BetCoin's behavior in any way (starting from copying SD's site nearly byte-by-byte). But the much more appropriate self-defence against blockchain flooding, IMHO, would be to tweak the bitcoind just to drop the transactions related to the BetCoin's addresses off the mempool, not to cheat them as a response.

Accepting big-value zero-fee zero-confirmation transaction is stupid. They deserve it.

Unconfirmed double spends are also perfectly possible without any hashpower at all... though you can certainly do them more consistently with some.

Especially with these stupid gambling services: you only need to change the txid so the actual better can have plausible deny-ability in the doublespending, and being successful only a small percentage of the time is enough to shift the odds in favor from the house to the player.

Might be worth offering two alternative hypothesizes that the data also works for:

(1) attacker spent a whole lot of BTC to frame ghash.io by paying it to a well known address of theirs unsolicited.
(2) ghash.io sold their hashpower to a third party, who used it to perform the attack and the payments were payments for more hashpower.

(IMO, (2) should be regarded as the community as even _worse_ than attacking themselves, ... but I know that the community doesn't regard blindly selling hashpower as treacherous.)

But (1) doesn't explain why ghash found 0 blocks to their address during the attack.
(2) is possible, but we need more data.

It would be good to hear from someone who had been mining on ghash back then to check their earnings.

No, but sometimes even high power pools will get massively unlucky. ... but if the miners were still paid, then yea, that supports the original hypothesis or (2).

We are now aware of this issue and we will perform an internal investigation to find out who is responsible for this.
Thank you for pointing out.

And what will u do? Call the police?

If I understand the CEX.IO website correctly, it's a place where you can temporarily buy mining power that runs onto your own node? We've seen one of those before, didn't we?

I am curious who is stupid enough to rent their hardware out to random strangers over the internet and whether they understand what the point of mining actually is.

An interesting and historic milestone! I think this would be the first time we've seen miners profitably double-spend against merchants. If ghash.io was selling their hashpower to a criminal (and defrauding merchants is a crime regardless of the exact technique you're using), then that suggests we should be formally discouraging miners from using that pool.

From my experience with Cex.io you don't actually gain access to any mining hardware, you just receive the pool shares/payouts based on the hashrate that you "own".

(But then again I may have missed some more advanced menus or something)

well it is a private operation with private hardware, miners cant do anything about it, this is the time when miners have to start thinking about using p2pool.

One thing I'm fuzzy on is how having lots of hashing power helps in this attack. As I understand it:

- You send a transaction for x coins and no fee. It will get confirmed /eventually/, but not for a while.
- A dice is rolled before the transaction is confirmed.  (silly gambling site!)
- If you win, you win. You wait for the transaction to be confirmed so everyone agrees what happened.
- If you lose, you send another transaction for the same x coins. (This time /with/ a fee?)
- The transaction is confirmed first as it has a higher fee and therefore more chance of getting into a block. This invalidates the previous transaction, and your subsequent loss to the gambling site.

You don't need to solve a block for this to happen, so what is the benefit of having the hashing power?

Not quite. At least today miners who have mempool accepted a transaction will not accept a conflicting one with higher fees, even if they're not attempting to mine the lower fee one yet.

You can pull off doublespends against no-confirm acceptors today, but it's a heck of a lot easier to do it reliably if you have some friendly hashpower.

Actually, you've been aware of it for a long time, you just didn't bother acknowledging it. I posted the details on your official thread on October 30th (which you completely ignored) here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=318010.60

In fact, you have completely ignored every question from everyone regarding this until now - why was that I wonder?

Someone who no longer has an ownership interest in it.

CEX.IO doesn't rent out hashpower. They actually sell hardware "ownership" by the GH/s.  You pay them some amount upfront per GH/s, equal to a fairly high price for mining hardware ($36.6/GH/s), and you "forever" own an interest in some hardware. If you own enough to equal at least one board worth, you can pay for shipping and have some gear de-racked and sent to you. They also provide a market where current owners of hardware can sell it to new owners.  They charge maintenance fees on the hardware (denominated in USD, currently about 2.78% of your income).

All of this hashrate, while in their hands, is currently required to be pointed at their "partner" mining pool, GHash.io which is an invite only pool.

Maybe a larger CEX.IO hashrate owner could get them to redirect their hashrate to something else, but thats not advertised anywhere, it's not clear to me that they'd have any obligation to do so... though I was unable to find a lot of detailed T/C for owning the hashrate, their contract mostly seems to focus on their exchange business.

this... and i'm sure if they can explain that outage everything else will become clearer...

If this is actually true then cex.io needs to give an explanation !! I wouldn't trust them if this is true!

Well, it's not quite that simple either.
If miners are behaving responsibly, they will have spam filters in place to avoid mining flood/DDoS transactions such as those going to BetCoin Dice.
There are two ways to filter transactions:
The most obvious way is to reject them from the memorypool. This has the benefit of not using up resources upfront. It also means you will accept any conflicting (eg, double-spending) transaction, no matter how much later it appears. For the miner and Bitcoin network, this is all positive. For BetCoin Dice, it means they are very vulnerable.
The other way, would be to accept it to your memorypool, but blacklist it from mining or relaying. This consumes the miner's resources, and if they don't have a sufficiently large memorypool, could cause them to mine fewer legitimate transactions. But it protects the spammers like BetCoin Dice because the double-spend is once again rejected.
When I ran Eligius, I experimented with both solutions at different times, and decided the former (which is better for Bitcoin and the pool, but bad for the flooder) is likely the more reasonable solution.

But to conclude, if miners are acting in the interests of Bitcoin, it will rationally be rather easy for anyone to double-spend DDoS transactions.

So, finally cex.io/ghash.io have decided to respond. I'd like to think that this was purely due to pressure from the Bitcoin community, well done.

Cex.io/ghash.io investigating cex.io/ghash.io though - can't wait to see how that pans out ::) It's like the police investigating the police  :P.

Still, this is their chance to silence the critics and clear their name, I only hope they take this opportunity to do so - and do it well.

Cex.io/ghash.io have found a niche market that appeals to noobs who want to get into mining but can't afford the hardware - it gives them an option to get into mining that they would never have had before, which is to be commended (even if it is at an extortionate price per G/hash). This section of users are inexperienced with Bitcoin & it's workings, and throw their trust (and hard earned cash) into cex.io/ghash.io blindly - not fully understanding the consequences of their actions. My concern is that if cex.io/ghash.io have already conned a Bitcoin company -and therefore Bitcoin itself - what is stopping them from doing it again to their users? One only has to look around to see other pools and wallet services that have done the same thing, services that had no scam accusations against them and seemed much more trustworthy than this one does.
Imagine if the worst happened & cex.io/ghash.io done a GBL & disappeared overnight - there would be a huge outcry from it's users all asking the same question - why weren't we warned? Why didn't anyone tell us about them?

Roadtrain has gone out on a limb, putting his reputation on the line & provided pretty solid evidence to substantiate the scam accusation, not for personal gain, but to inform the community of what he believes is going on - the least the community can do is warn users of cex.io/ghash.io of the current accusations until solid evidence/actions are taken by cex.io/ghash.io that either prove their innocence or that appropriate action has been taken against the employee who perpetrated the con (if any).

I urge cex/ghash to grab this opportunity to clear their name, I also urge the Bitcoin community to keep the pressure on them to do so - it can only be good for everyone.

Peace  ;D

I haven't seen anything to commend except their business savvy:

Hashrate on their service is >2x more expensive than actually buying the hardware— more like 10x the price of stuff still in pre-order, and will never make a profit at those prices according to the calculator on their site. By doing so they centralize mining and create a moral hazard with apparent results like the one's we've seen here.

@PatMan, in reality people don't seem to care much. They even come to this thread to post their referral links (I have reported them though).
I personally haven't even been registered with them until recently (just to be able to see their hashrate surpassing that of BTCGuild at one point).
I did my best to inform people by posting in several threads, but it seems these threads have a good chance of being flooded with tears in the end.

Are you serious? Your questions been answered several times. Both by cex.io and some reputable members of bitcoin community (not me, of course, as I'm not reputable). Yet we shall care because you think that ppl making millions will steal change from the beggars.

Just wait for investigation to finish.

exactly... since you can't control those gigahashes to mine currencies of your choice or point to other pools...so yes, seems like centralized mining is what they are after... me thinks they want to maintain that since the higher the hashrate the better chances of finding blocks yes?

Point me to "answers". I didn't want answers cause I didn't ask, I wanted public opinions.

You must be very rich if hundreds BTC is change for you.

I'm of course interested how their internal investigation ends up. If you have any facts to throw at me, do it now. Thinking that a company making millions is honest by definition because it won't bother stealing is a false assumption.

PS. At least you didn't include your cex ref link in the post like the last time, you're making progress. You're biased, I doubt the discussion with you can be productive.

Yeah, maybe I was being too kind to them there..... ;)

That's the problem, people don't care enough - until they lose everything, but then it's too late - as has happened before.

Anyway, I've just read their "official" statement on the matter & am still mulling over the details, or lack of them. It's a shame that all the naysayers who were so quick to criticise Roadtrain, me & many others who pushed cex.io/ghash.io into responding to the subject/accusation, don't realise that it was being done for THEIR benefit & security. Had nobody said anything, nothing would have been done - no investigation, no statement - nothing.

I'll reserve judgement until I've studied a little deeper, but at least we are finally in the process of finding out what exactly went on, at last.

You misunderstand completely.

Yes I did.
Thanks for the efforts.
And I do care about cex.io+ghash.io being honest operators. I just don't think its time to accuse them and I've misinterpreted request for explanations as an accusation.

edit:
In case you've missed this:

Still a very bad sign though.

I am following the btc address links on blockchaininfo and see something odd on https://blockchain.info/address/1AJyDV5LPSE2H3MMhu69sii6a3etD8nxeV

959.69 comes in and 1.01 goes out; final balance 0 ?!
Final balance should be 958.68 or not ?

1,000 =/= 1.000

Agree, stupid decimal comma issue. But did you notice it still doesn't add up ?
959.69 comes in, 1000.01 goes out and balance is 0 ?!

Wow... Someone needs to look into this..

Edit: Seen that statement from Cex.io, you would think they would have safeguards in place for this sort of thing..

It adds up, see:
https://blockchain.info/tx/faa7bc8b99376efa774045e79b42771fe668341b00290a61cd416992571c590d (https://blockchain.info/tx/faa7bc8b99376efa774045e79b42771fe668341b00290a61cd416992571c590d)

But it sure is a strange account:
https://blockchain.info/address/199kVcHrLdouz9k9iW3jh1kpL7j9nLg7pn (https://blockchain.info/address/199kVcHrLdouz9k9iW3jh1kpL7j9nLg7pn)

I am leaning towards the idea that blockchain.info is showing false information. Just look at the transactions that are going to the 8000 BTC 199kVcHrLdouz9k9iW3jh1kpL7j9nLg7pn address. They all show 1000, but below it the total BTC moved is way lower.

I don't get what you mean, what's lower? It says:

It's very strange, and it is still receiving a lot from ghash - probably a large miner (or ghash itself).
It needs an explanation. Cause there's a contradiction.

Notice also that 6 of 8 inputs were at the exact 3-day period we are talking about.

Look at the transaction of 2013-11-05 15:28:44 on https://blockchain.info/address/199kVcHrLdouz9k9iW3jh1kpL7j9nLg7pn
Now click on the first incoming address https://blockchain.info/address/1LaourP34PKhBF3X5gK9ZoTABWUyQkCvxB and look at all the transactions going to 199kVcHrLdouz9k9iW3jh1kpL7j9nLg7pn. Those outgoing transactions each total over 1000 BTC, but below it is a way lower amount (in red). Strange! Must be a bug on blockchain.info.

Looking at http://blockexplorer.com/address/199kVcHrLdouz9k9iW3jh1kpL7j9nLg7pn this might explain: Looks like blockchain.info has problems with multiple occurances of the same address, for example look at how many times 1Mczj3eZzaRiAETJY9YzC5h7cduEDhnBHs occurs on http://blockexplorer.com/address/199kVcHrLdouz9k9iW3jh1kpL7j9nLg7pn

These 1000 BTC transactions spend outputs of several tx's of different addresses. Open any transaction and click "Show scripts & coinbase", you'll see the full picture.

so they are telling that NO ONE from ghash/cex has recognized that ALL btc was send to ONE adress for THREE days?  :o

Lulz - Mr "I've used my pool to attack an alt-coin" defending a pool doing a double spend.

Luke doesn't like SD betting sites and has 3 times now attempted to block them:
1) His "special I can't tell anyone mining on my pool" rules for excluding transactions long ago on his pool
2) The "dust" changes to bitcoind to block SD confirms
3) Address reuse being blocked as a so called bad thing for bitcoin which will of course stop SD type sites from functioning

... and here giving excuses for a pool to attempt double spends.

I'd love to see his reaction if the one losing due to the double spend was himself.
That would be absolutely hysterical.

I really don't follow why anyone wouldn't see the stupidity of this guy basically saying things like bitcoin can't handle transactions, so lets block them.

Luke there's a reason you got voted last in the Bitcoin Foundation election (and got way less votes than anyone else) and that's coz you do crap like this and have been doing it for a very long time.
Jesus doesn't love you, you won't burn in hell coz God doesn't exist and you really better stop believing those voices you hear that say "everything you do is correct coz God loves you"
(that's the sort of thing catholic priests think as they rape altar boys)

Look at it this way.  It's a simile.  Look at Sally as the FBI, the parents are the DOJ, Annie is the Senate Banking Committee, Jane is Senator Dodd as Chair of the Senate Banking Committee, interest free loans to Senator Dodd are like you owe a favor to the mafia, and the Chair of the Senate Banking committee taking interest free loans that he may not even have to pay back is like the mafia having the director of the FBI in their pocket if the FBI is to the DOJ as the Senate Banking Committee Chair is to the Senate and the banking system as a whole.  I hope I made this clear.

O_O

I don't get it / I'm so confused by all that.

What was that story about? Are ya'll talking in code or something?

Either you're making a really strange metaphor or... are you saying this double-spend had specific named parties involved and the united states FBI and DOJ involved?

 :D :D :D :D :D

It was a metaphor dude.

This was one con that, surprisingly, the CIA, FBI, DOJ, DHS, IRS or any other stasi type outfit had nothing to do with. It was a con solely perpetrated by Ghash/CEX.IO - pure & simple.

So could the entire operation be a scam?

As interesting as making a market for mining power is...   could the entire thing be one BIG con?

They hold all the mining equipment and the entire market cap of the GHS/BTC pair, correct?

What is stopping them from 'pulling the plug' on the whole thing - taking everyone's BTC and mining power with them?

Please correct me if I'm wrong...

Also every possibility that it is a ponzi scheme?
Is a great business for being a Ponzi. Pretend you have hashing power on Ghash.io.
Get money up front, payout with the money coming in. And disappear at the point it starts going wrong.
Only cost is a web site - and some way to convince Ghash.io not to speak out (that is the one bit that does not make sense).



You can download the directors names/address from:
http://wck2.companieshouse.gov.uk//wcframe?name=accessCompanyInfo
for free - just enter the company number - 08757996.
Both directors are Ukranian, and have same surname.
And personal address looks odd. In that from google streetview looks like a house but address looks like an accountants (which is now allowed in the UK).

Also birthdays look odd in that they are 4 months apart - so guess cousins?

Could not read name on company address - will walk past tomorrow! But looked like an accountant or similar.

Thank you. And Oleksandr isn't surname, that's first name, its Alexander wrote in translit and in Ukrainian dialect of Russian language :)

That's if they even have any hardware. You can never really tell with these services if they actually own any mining gear or not.

How is this not about Bitcoins failure? Bitcoins flawed system allowed for this to happen.

Oh wow. This is a mess.

Something needs to be done.

They are the biggest pool right now at 29%.

https://blockchain.info/pools

Don't worry it's not Bitcoins fault, it's just it's shitty design that will collapse upon itself. Maybe Gavin should of worked on this along with other architecture issues instead of the wonderful useless update.

I agree with this. This shouldn't be blocked nor discouraged. If this is causing problems to the Bitcoin network, then, fix them! It is like an app that crash when you click on a button and the developer place a text below the button that reads "Clicking this button is not good for the app" instead of just fixing the f***ing code. I know that on this case it may not be easy, but don't try to ignore what sooner or later will happen anyway.

in the KnC thread with eligius' recent trouble, posters were flocking to ghash because of their 0% fee.

In fact ghash is highly unreliable (consistently 1-4% block reject rate) with 3 rejects out of their past 100, and 7 hashrate fall episodes of between 500TH - 2000TH in their last 100 blocks

On the other hand, btcguild has a 3% fee, consistently has 5-week-average luck of 103%+/-0.5, has a low orphan rate <1%, has close to 100% uptime, and pays out orphan blocks to miners.

Btcguild has also had a higher luck than ghash.io for every published week (since ghash started sharing stats with organofcorti) despite the fact
according to OOC

So we have what Satoshi and everyone else warned exactly as the thing that should not happen.

The majority pool is dishonest.

This whole experiment can go sour pretty pretty fast.

I genuinely fear for everyone who's throwing their coins into this outfit, thinking their going to make a profit. Still, when the sh*t hits the fan - which it will - nobody can say they weren't warned......

And we can't do anything about this?

If you are a multi-millionaire you can do something about it, just buy and setup the same power of GHasg.IO so you will balance the network......

mmitech I thought bitcoin was initially set up not for gambling or volatility but to protect hard earned money of investors which was losing its worth due to lose monetary policies of Central banks worldwide. Now everything has turned into a gamble either its stock market, forex market, futures market or bitcoins. I am really tired of short term investors

bitcoin is not a short term investment, on every stock market there is the temporary riders that jumps in and out collecting some profits but the long term strategy always win... if you knew about bitcoin 2009 and if you would invest only $100 into bitcoin you would be a multi-millionaire today.

the network security is something else, and this is what we are discussing in this thread, you have GHash.IO constantly adding power you also have BTCguild with the same amount of power

https://i.imgur.com/72floZ8.png




what I don't understand is how miners keep joining BTCguild when they have many other pools with lower hashrate, some even join the private pool GHash.IO !!!!

http://mentaso.com/bitcoin-news/cex-part-2-the-hacked-account-and-children-playing-grownups.html

Do I understand it correctly that if those Dice services waited for even 1 confirmation, this attack wouldn't happen?

Yup.

That's the most retarded thing ever. First off, he left before most of that even materialized. Second off, he left because he wants to remain anonymous. The longer he stayed connected to Bitcoin using his original alias the smaller the chances of achieving that.

I agree, but by saying he left you really mean that he is just not using his nick name, I am sure he is still around and visit this forum and daily post under another nick name ;)

Doesn't my previous response imply just that? ;)

oh I see now

If anyone is still not convinced that mining centralization is a threat, this is a taste of the bad things that can happen.

Hmm... there is a lot of speculation and misinformation in here as well as some good facts.

I think if we break it all down. People are worried that this pool is dishonest because of the double spend "attack" which I agree is not good. However, in perspective I do mine at Ghash.io and contrary to what others have said you can easily cash out BTC. I know that I have personally cashed out a ton of BTC with no difficulty. It is as simple and withdrawing BTC or setting up an "investor" with an external wallet and 100% payout. The pool fee is 0% as stated and indeed they have had some problems with orphaned blocks and at time there have been some minor issues where solved blocks did not pay out properly. However on those solved blocks not paying out... each and every time they were paid once the issue was resolved. As for support they appear to have an very adequate staff because each and every ticket I have opened has been resolved within an hours time.

There is also confusion in this thread about how CEX.io / Ghash.io operates. They do not sell the hashing power that is pointed to the pool. With that regard the pool operates just like any other. The CEX.io component allows users to buy hashing power along the lines of cloud hashing. The hashing power they sell is... as someone else pointed out... essentially a share of hardware they own/control. You pay a % fee taken at the time blocks are paid. This is how they make money and cover costs. While I obviously don't have access to their financials I am sure they are making pretty good money... just like many other pools where they charge a pool fee etc. All in all I really think that they are probably a profitable enterprise.

As a business owner myself I have to throw my perspective out there that I just can not come to a conclusion that they would be a "dishonest" pool looking perform some 51% attack or any other attack as it would ruin the hard work and effort they have obviously put into the business. This is not to mention that they would also have to have other pools join in for the 51% attack that people are in fear of.

The best solution overall to large pools and the fears of things becoming centralized is though competition. I have used several pools throughout my mining history as I am sure many people have. I have come to point most of my gear at Ghash.io because I like the added benefit of being able to add hashing power on demand. The ability to easily get hashing power is also contributing to the growth of this pool. As others said above new miners looking to get into the game can get started with fairly low barriers to entry. This directly leads to pool growth because many of those new miners are also buying equipment. It would be a logical assumption that any of these new miners with physical equipment will eventually point their gear to Ghash.io. They currently have what I would consider a major competitive advantage over other pools. There are two ways to temper this growth: 1.) Through competition for miners or 2.) Discredit them so that they are forced to go away. I wonder if that is the reason for this thread? To slander them out of existance.

All in all when reading the original post and subsequent replies I can't help but get the feeling that the initial post by the OP is more of a "witch hunt" than anything else and all the posts I see about scams and dishonest pools etc are really starting to scare me as a proponent of BitCoin. There was another thread about what people think is the biggest threat to Bit Coin. When I read that post I did not have an answer but now only a few hours later I do.

I think the Bit Coin community is the biggest threat to Bit Coin. Each and every day there are posts screaming SCAM here and Scam there. While I am not oblivious to the fact that there are scams occurring I think the vast majority of the claims are unwarranted. The more we cry foul as a bit coin community with conjecture and un-substantiated claims the less reliable and attractive the Bit Coin network becomes to the world. The more we cry scam and foul play the more attention we garner from Governments, Law Enforcement, and Media looking for a scandal. When the negative attention reaches a certain threshold we can expect massive government attention and regulation.

My advice is that we temper our claims of foul play across the board and keep unsubstantiated claims out of the discussions. Be vigilant to look into possible abuse but do so in such a manner that we don't permanatly mar the reputation of Bit Coin. If we want total Bit Coin adoption we can not be slinging mud in the streets as conventional banking institutions look down from their skyward offices as they laugh all the way to the bank knowing that we are going to implode without any additional effort on their part.

Paging Mr.Cat, Mr. Fried Cat...

No, with 29% hashpower a double spending attack would have a 60% (https://people.xiph.org/~greg/attack_success.html) success rate on confirmed transactions. The fact that the success rate isn't 100% would just mean that they'd need their profits when successful to be at least 17 BTC in order to make up for the cost of a lost block (less if they don't have to pay their miners for orphans).
 

mmitech I am new to bitcoins actually I don’t understand what is double-spending can you please explain me about it? It seem you have made a good post but really I don’t understand it well so please provide me some links that shall help in learning bitcoins in short period of time. Thanks in advance

https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-finance/money-and-banking/bitcoin/v/bitcoin-what-is-it (https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-finance/money-and-banking/bitcoin/v/bitcoin-what-is-it)

What I'm wondering with these miners with really big market shares is how long they'll be able get away with being regulated like a node in a p2p network. If there was only one miner and 100% of transactions went through them, governments would obviously be saying they were financial intermediaries, and expecting them to do consumer protection and anti-money laundering checking and follow know-your-customer regulations. If you only have 1% you're clearly a p2p node without control over the transactions, but where's the dividing line? 50%?

This could be end up being another of the many cases where governments seem to be shutting down any business that is excessively centralized and fails to follow strict crypto-anarchist principles.

This is a flaw of a decentralized currency powered by democracy. The following is a nice video on explaining the implications of this effect:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo

In essence, those who are worrying about a single pool getting to 51% (i.e. "first past the post") will go to the second largest pool, instead to the smaller ones. Essentially only two pools will be left.

Same with the two-party system in America.

When I minded I used P2Pool https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/P2Pool

I remember mining at P2pool as well, but the problem at the time was dust, I would pay crazy fees for transactions, although I was looking at P2pool and the Litecoin Devs with the Bitcoin devs were giving funds to make a better software that solves many of the problems, I don't know how is it today with P2Pool since I stopped mining a long time ago but I think this problem is solved.

Hint: you can still use P2pool even if the dust issue still exist,  the key to reduce this problem is to use coin control, you simply take all inputs to one transaction and pay the fee only once, this is what I was doing...

and P2Pool is the only solution for decentralized mining so I don't know if miners understand that and at least give it a try !

I felt a moral obligation to use p2pool so I just did. Everyone should make that decision for themselves though.

If only two pools are left, then definitely one of them will cross the 51% mark and the other one will be decimated.

The analogy is false. Firstly, there is no cultural component that favours membership in any one pool over any other (as there is with the political party system). Secondly, as opposed to the political party system, when it comes to Bitcoin there is a much more limited number of variables at play. Thirdly, switching pools is trivial, and since it is the miners themselves who stand to lose the most by destroying the network, they have the greatest incentive to switch, as opposed to the political party system where, in principle at least, achieving 100% power is desirable.

I would add, simply, that this is an explanation for two parties emerging in a system of winner-take-all elections.  It doesn't apply to mining because it's not winner take all.  With smaller pools, and individual miner simply gets bigger shares of less-frequent blocks.

Ok now we reached that point, there is a potential risk and something has to be done now, today I was checking again to just see this

https://i.imgur.com/AbyAknd.png

https://blockchain.info/pools?timespan=24hrs

42%, up from 38% 4 days ago. Would be good to have a graph over time.

* what would be the implications of reaching 51%?

* what was the most recorded % of any pool? I thought BTC guild had 49% for quite a while.

* Why are people adding and not running away?

ignorance. and the possibility that its their own hashing power being added, terribly frightening. Hopefully mining companies can start to produce and deliver closer to dates and re assure people that they won't get bfl'd lol I'd have a miner if it didn't require such a leap of faith D:

If this happens expect a little bit of panic and BTC price dropping. If I were GHash.IO I would be actively selling as much bitcoin as possible right about now. Unless they have honour and stop the pool from getting over 50%, but from the sounds of it they have no honour and would rather cause panic.

http://organofcorti.blogspot.com.au/2013/12/december-8th-2013-weekly-pool-and.html

gmaxwell quote from above:  "for GHash.io/CEX.io: the miners are captive and cannot leave"

The cex.io price per GH/s is consistently too high to earn a bitcoin profit, yet people still pay it.  If someone were to create a similar service to cex.io but allow short-selling of GH/s, then I'm certain this would drive the price to its natural level.  Miners would then leave cex.io in favour of this new cloud-mining farm and CEX/Ghash would have less money to re-invest in new mining hardware.  

It's like they are able to grow because their customers are eager to lose money for the privilege of "cloud mining."

Hard to say, but somebody had lost a lot of bitcoins to theft or fraud, and instead of being a purely distributed p2p network, Bitcoin was now controlled by one mining company that had the technical ability to censor and even reverse the transactions in question, that somebody might want to explore whether the mining company had any legal liability to refund what they had lost...

https://i.imgur.com/vi7pgws.png


this is how it looks now, the community have to do something about it

http://i44.tinypic.com/2co0kyu.jpg

And Still growing, pool speed up from 4.16PH to 4.61PH over last 2 shifts (8 mins each).  Perhaps they'll reach 51% by the weekend
Edit : 4.7PH 4.81PH now...

Do you really think that other people, who do the opposite of what you do, are just plain stupid? Have it ever occured to you maybe you don't know something they do? CEX.IO is a trading platform, not a mining pool. If you can't earn a profit there, it doesn't mean someone else can't.

Hopefully we can all sort this, I've put up my current mining share on there for sale since I'm not heavily invested in it, more of a get to know how it works deal. Anyone care to make a p2pool tutorial video for each version?

Situation is getting too risky. I can't trust bitcoin when a single entity control almost half of hashing power. No one should trust it.

The possibility of this happening was known since the very beginning so why are you all freaking out now when it's too late? No central bank you say? The entity with the most computing power is the central bank. Will be interesting what happens now.

This will be affecting adoption rates massively. If I were thinking of buying in and I were doing my due diligence, this would certainly put me off.

 Glad I bailed on ghash when I did, but this is scary to see their hash rate climb near 51%, and all we do is just sit back and watch it like a bad horror movie :(

 So this is how Bitcoin dies... (?)

That's much worse than any central bank. Central banks usually are public companies. Such structures are regulated by law and/or by government executives.

We have no law or public authority here, so this "central bank" is able to do whatever the owner wants. And nobody can stop, inspect or regulate such type of activity. It's absolute monarchy as is. The owner may be able to accept or decline any new protocol rules or updates, for example...

+21'000'000

Isn't this kind of centralized hashing power too dangerous, even way below 51%?

Doesn't it gradually change from a "you may be successfull at tempering with the blockchain" to a "you are guaranteed to be successfull" @ 51% (or really anything above 50%)?

If u read about Selfish Mining u'll see that we already have a big problem.

Maybe you can help me.  I don't get why selfish mining is a problem.  To me it seems like a miner is getting a head start on the next block at the risk of losing the current block.

If this is unethical (and I'm not sure it is), it is only unethical toward other miners.  It doesn't disturb the functionality of Bitcoin from a user's perspective.

It lowers "51% attack" threshold to 33%.

so GHash owner actually attempted a double spend and is showing no worries about the fact that they are approaching 51%?  What a selfish, and stupid, person.  Although as a previous poster mentioned, maybe they don't care if they ruin BTC by going 51%.

I'm not.

First time was when BTCguild started hitting 50-51% then locked people from signing up in response till it evened out again; second was the feathercoin hit that showed exactly what could happen, never a matter of if, but when and how we respond to avoid it in the future.

IQ approximation is possible.

IQ = 120/ (THashPS^(1/7))

http://img837.imageshack.us/img837/2021/oj71.png

Yes, man owning the world biggest mining pool is stupid?!? And, yes, he doesn't care if he ruins his bread & butter business - Bitcoin?!?

I'm not fan of what is happening (single pool reaching close to 51%), but please think twice before writing such a stupid things. If GHash.IO tries to double spend it practically means the end of their primary source of income. Nobody is that stupid. It's not nice to be in somebodys mercy, but this situation is far from critical. Everyone who is aware of what is happening will switch pools if he can, and in a month there would be much more GHs deployed which can reduce their percentage easily. Bitcoin was in much worse trouble before, remember?

Who said they r not hired by an ABC agency?

Trolling or serious?

Just show a possible explanation.

Actually it is a very possible situation.

When two hero members seriously consider this as a possibility it's time for me to shut up.

Well i have to say that if it is true then they would disguise their blocks so it does not look like they are making them and are having such a high % of the total hashrate.

We shouldn't trust to blockchain.info stats also...

SOmeone above laid out a VERY possible explanation of why they might do this, and someone above has now added another possible explanation.  So it's not "such stupid things."  And there is evidence they tried to double spend!  so...I stand by my post.  I mean where is the owner to at least say "don't worry"?

Bitcoin exists exactly because we cannot trust no one. That's why it exists and why it was made how it is made. We must suppose that any vulnerability will be exploited eventually. People can be corrupted.

CEX.io admin in chat specified that as the 51% network dominance was reached they will announce we will be able to point our contracts at any pool. Now weather they mean any BITCOIN POOL or any SHA-256 is still unknown.

I firmly believe a money making venture will not shoot themselves in the face by destroying the network marketplace in which they are profiting and succeeding. There is no gain in destroying bitcoin now, unless they have some "counter agenda" that is as hilarious as hollywood or obamacare.

They are not a government, entertainment producer nor 'BigPharma.'

Just my 2 mbits.

Consider how this may not really be any better after all.

Having >50% of the hash power and pointing it to other pools simply means that they can point it back at will.  Worse still they can in fact entice others to join ghash.io by artificially reducing their percentage by switching some to other pools and then switch back again anytime some shenanigans suits them.

By selling contracts, they have garnered this control.

The decentralized trustless network is becoming centralized and is now requiring trust.  The erosion of some of the core merits of the bitcoin protocol is a serious matter.  It is astounding that a summary report of an "internal investigation" is considered authoritative and exculpatory.
It merely stated that "it was the old guys, not us" and gave no new transparency or plan to change anything, no new controls implemented.

Miners, take a look at what you are doing and how, please.  We are in your hands.

Imagine they are as you say, just doing it for the money.

How much money would be made if they sold all their BTC, then performed some horrible acts destroying confidence in Bitcoin, then bought back in cheap, disbanded their pool and started again with new names, more money and experience?

The point is not to rely on their honesty, the point is to not require it.

https://ghash.io/ghashio_press_release.pdf

Unfortunately this is an issue that has been brought on partially by ASIC mining, as less actual devices mining with alot more hashing power means less diversity.

These are good words, good action should follow swiftly.

They will continue to maintain control over the control of contract owners' ability to switch pools... and the visibility into whether it is in fact happening.

okay.

Reassuring, though it'd be more so if they specified a threshold at which their counter measures kicked it.  Say, 40%.  They only say that they'll avoid reaching 51%.  Does that mean they'd be comfortable at 49%?

Well, a promise is a promise guys. We can breath easily now. Bitcoin is safe!!

Lets all hope GHash gets up to 51% quickly and stays there for a long time so no other entity will have a chance to perform an attack. Bitcoin would then be in good hands. Not exactly decentralized but in good hands. Promises are good forever.

This still isn't very good for what's supposed to be a trust-free decentralised payment network  :-\

There's not difference for us between 40 and 49%. As long as they do not reach the 51% we are safe.

The real problem is that even if they allow users to mine from other pools, they can just switch back in every moment. That's a potential persistent threat, altought i don't think they are so stupid to really try to perform a 51% attack : that would be a suicide for them....

This is not 100% correct. There IS a difference between 40% and 49%. Even 49% is enough to do a successful double-spending attack.

SHAME and TRUST are powerful tools.  There is much that can be done.   I am researching this now.  As a precaution, I have informed all our hosting clients that requested Ghash.io as their pool are now being moved off the service until we get clear data on if the pool or customers in the pool are working in a counter-productive manner to Bitcoin mining.

Oooh, interesting. By looking at majority of the posts on this website, I would say most customers make choices based on projected returns. What if the customer doesn't care about the Bitcoin idealogy and just wants the best return on investment so to speak? Well, not my problem at least.  ;D

These are valid points.   

This reminds me of a recent Bloomberg story about all the fines JP Morgan paid tied to all the scandals they are involved with.   The guest said, "all that matters is their balance-sheet".  Basically he was giving cover to all their illegal actions because in the end, they found a way to profit from it while only paying $20 billion~ fines, like committing fraud is just a cost of doing business. 

That type of greedy criminal attitude is one of largest threats to Bitcoin. 

this is called horse shit, they did double spend @ 23% and nothing is preventing them from doing so now, they shouldn't have more than 33% ( read the selfish miner) neither any other pool no mater how honest the operator is, you never put trust on any individual it must be distributed equally among everyone on the network.. the is what Bitcoin as concept came to solve...


you fucking noobs don't get it right ?  you really piss me off !! "it is ok" , "it is not 51% yet" "they are honest" "who would destroy their business model"  well I guess you think the same about your banks, it is now that we do something about it or it is too late....

This has to be one of the most worrying developments I've read about in a long time. No single entity should be able to disrupt the system, even supposing their actions would need to be stupid or self-defeating :-\

Well, we have to make appearance that everything is fine or at least under our control if we don't want to see single digits...

The problem is that regular miners are attracted by 0% fees. You can do nothing unless you have enough BTC to incentive the half of the ghash.io miners to switch to your pool which also has 0% fees and you have enough resources to maintain such a pool.

Edit: or, well, all their miners as ghash.io states that 55% is the external miners and 45% - internal ghash.io hashing resources.

this is exactly what is worrying, it means that the regular miners has no clue neither cares about the network health, most of new comers try "generating free money" when just introduced to Bitcoin and this means they doesn't take any effort of understanding how Bitcoin protocol works.... I am really pissed off.... I wish I could change things....


nothing changed since I posted about this matter, in fact the hash rate keeps increasing, it is like we are doing them free advertisement instead of bringing awareness

https://i.imgur.com/sBRNIIZ.png  

It was the latter, however, it was not a simple experiment but the continuous intended behavior.

Single digits would be the best thing for the currency right now.  Clear out the speculators, let the regulators laugh us off again, and think hard about developing ways to avoid this kind of bullshit going forward.  Most importantly, it would send a clear signal that getting 30+% of hashing power is not a desirable thing, because it crashes the currency and makes all of your investments worth nothing.  Then maybe pools won't be so nonchalant. 

Bring it on.

I understand your concern, but why do you think that GHash.IO not understand the senselessness of the "51% attack"?
Is they stupid idiots? Do they want to compromise a network and turn their assets into dust?
In my opinion they are clearly indicated their position and we can only hope for their prudence. It's not as small as it seems, because the rich people always have common sense and logical thinking, otherwise they would not be rich.

Hope? I hope Bitcoin is backed by something stronger than hope.

Yep, it's backed by Pope

http://img2.timeinc.net/people/i/2013/news/130325/pope-francis-2-300.jpg

We are all have to pray for divine punishment to heretic church of the cex.io and its clerics. Because a double-spending it's the eighth deadly sin here.

Yup, it's backed by hope. Maths, Self-Interest and Hope, but of these the greatest is Hope.

Maths and self-interest might turn out to do what we need them to, but it's not a sure thing. We'll know more in a few years, when the mining business has completed the inevitable transition from benevolent gentleman anarchists to psychopaths with MBAs.

OK, it's obvious that Bitcoin should be trust-free, but it temporarily isn't. That's life. There should be no wars, but there are, all over the world. What's positive in this whole situation is that it is temporary. They will stop accepting new miners, and they just can't cut off people who simply will not switch from their pool no matter how unreasonable that is. Considering the insane rate GHs being added to a network, and the fact they have 55% of their hashing power from outside miners, they should drop under 40% in one or two difficulty increases, one month at the most. If they would not be under 40% a month from now, then we should be worried cause they are lying right now about being serious and aggressive in reducing their network percentage.

before i have to trust ghash.io i choose to trust the government. Seriously, guys.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=407843.msg4419203#msg4419203

if they choose to ignore all the voices and go forward with aggressive expansion i choose the exit. And i know i am not the only one. Just stating 'we will not reach 51%' is not enough here. They need to stop long before that. 35% of the network is more than enough for a single entity.

Do you really think they have 55% of outside miners? what makes you so sure about this? if they can add the feature to mine with the ghashes on other pools who tells you they arent doing so with their own gear right now? Imo if people buy the overpriced hashpower nothing ensures that they didnt infiltrate other pools with their mining power already. In the end what we need is transparency and some sort of evidence that they play with open cards.
They ask their users to give out their IDs by the 4th of february... First of all we should all claim to see a valid ID of the owner of cex and himself holding it up to the camera or something like this because right now this is labcoin 2.0 to me (ftwk)

orly? Which government? I'm starting to suspect there's some anti-Russian tone in this argument if someone is preferring the government over GHash.

What? Why do you link ghash.io with Russia? I am Russian and I live in Russia and I don't see the point.

I agree. We will see similar mealy-mouth responses from their management in the future.

I thought the geographic location of their mining data-centers and servers is in Russia, is this not the case?

I apologize if I've offended you, as I certainly did not mean to imply that people using cex.io are--as you said--"plain stupid."  The trading of GH/s is a very nice feature, and I'm sure talented traders can earn a profit.  

What I was saying is that the lack of short-selling keeps the price per GH/s higher than it otherwise would be if short-selling were possible, and that I believe people holding GH/s long-term will tend to lose BTC.  For example, if short-selling were possible, I would be eager to short-sell many GH/s contracts, ride them out till they are worth close to zero, and (I believe) earn a profit.  If shorting is indeed profitable, investors will keep doing it until the expected return from shorting is too small to be worth the risk, at which point the price per GH/s will have reached a more natural level.  

If another service similar to cex.io were to open, and allow for short-selling, I expect the price would be lower than at cex.io and cloud-hashers would leave in favour of this new service.  This would cut into the profitability of cex.io and constrain their ability to purchase additional mining hardware.  

Would it be wise then to ensure that future alt-coins have protection against ASIC implementation to prevent what's happening to Bitcoin from happening to a future alt-coin?

Although they could have some DCs in Russia there is no proof of that. Originally the ghash.io as well as cex.io domain names have been registered by some Ukrainian people but definitely with fake address info in the WHOIS databases so unverifiable, as well as the fact that these people are actually Ukrainian residents. Later it was claimed that the business has been bought by some people in the UK and this is what we all believe now. There is no publicly available info on where they actually have all their assets.

Anyway, I can't see any 'anti-Russian tone' in the post you have cited ;)

That might be a good thing if it could be done, and Litecoin tries to do it, but it's not clear that it can. If you make it difficult, but not impossible, to create specialist hardware that can out-compete commodity hardware then you risk making the problem worse: One person cracks it before everyone else does, and they get a monopoly until everyone catches up.

The real alternative is not to use proof-of-work at all, but making an alternative work well isn't a trivial problem.

any government. They are at least known with their names and faces and can be held accountable to an extend for their actions. No anti-russian tone there ;)

Who said NovaCoin PeerCoin?

Probably a front for the royal family and the Rothschilds  ::)

A cryptocurrency based on promise...

it was sarcasm if you didn't understand  ;)

https://i.imgur.com/xT5PE0S.png

The problem is that not the ghash.io. This is us, the community, who still do mine on ghas.io.

I know, the other part says so. The point is that their press release is just a BS. Everyone who read it wasted his time.

I totally agree, the problem is with miners, I have the feeling that most of miners don't have a basic understanding of the protocol, and most of them cares only about how much they can mine and at what price they will sell.

I guess that only RealSolid is allowed to do so, because this approach is proprietary. So we need his blessing and perhaps his permission  :)

It's always easy to think others don't understand something, but it's a lousy explanation. Look at this from a miners perspective - let's say you've invested 50-100 BTC in couple of miners and expect to mine 30 BTC in a few months or half a year. There are only three pools with network percentage above 5%: Eligius, BTC Guild and GHash.IO. BTC Guild is notorious for its 3% mining fee, compared to GHash 0%. If you mine 30 BTC in above example, is it all right for you to keep 29 BTC and give 1 BTC to BTC Guild or would you try to keep all 30? Eligius is a pool with worse service of those three, with great variance, and many miners are reporting 2% less income when mining on it than other two pools. We know from many papers why mining on pools with small percentages is not much better than solo mining, so miners have no alternative. They have to either go to GHash.IO, or accept less income for the good of the network. It's not a solution to bitch at GHash.IO, but to bring some high-quality competition on the market. Until then GHash.IO will have to artificially reduce it's own network percentage by rejecting new users who want their services.

P2pool with 0% is your answer, and yes miners created this situation, there were plenty of pools out there and the network was more or less balanced, but most of new miners were thinking of that 0% fee instead of the network overall health.....

beat me to it, new miners have no clue of how Bitcoin works and they always think bigger is better, BTW they doesn't give a flying fuck simply because they don't understand, just look, the prove that we are trying to spread the word for few months and it keeps getting worse, it is like we are doing Ghash.IO free advertisement...

when all miners spread their hashes the variance issue will be resolved, but you all have to start trying, you are carrying the network and you have to start acting responsibly, if you are aware of this then try to remind your fellow miners educate them and spread the word .... 

Hammer. Nail. Head.   +1

How exactly does one do any of this?  Even with 51%? I don't understand how any of this is possible =/

The way how those gaming sites like BetCoin Dice work is that whenever they see a transaction to one of their addresses, they immediately (i. e., without confirmations) check their random number and send back a winning or losing transaction.  This makes them particularly prone to double-spending attacks, where the attacker only in case they lost the bet try to send a double-spend transaction with much higher fees.  If the second one gets confirmed, they get back their "lost" bet, and can this way just collect the winnings without losing any money.  I think this was already performed against Satoshi Dice as a proof-of-concept a year ago or something like that.

You don't even need 51% (or any hash rate at all) to attempt such attacks, but what was alleged against GHash.IO in this thead is that they cooperate with the attackers (or are the attackers themselves) by specifically mining the double-spend transaction.  This makes it much easier to have it actually confirmed, as opposed to the case where you just hope on your luck and use high fees to incentivise pools to mine the attack transaction rather than the original one.

Ghash is at 38% again, watching the blockchain over the last week, their luck has been great, (as expected) so why would any miner WANT to leave,
it's something that needs to be looked at by the core devs at bitcoin.

I use BTCguild and Eligius, and both have had pretty crummy luck this week,
BTCguild has some of the lowest luck I've seen from them in awhile, about 102.28% currently,
I know still decent, but I actually think that # is a bit high, and I know even BTCguild could hold a majority too,
depending on how the next couple of months go,

the point is, if one pool is doing a lot better, a representation of having a huge amount of hash,
people who can sign into there will,
and the percentage will eventually become 40% again, or greater.
It's human nature to be with a "winning team".

I feel like there should be an agreement (possibly backed by incentive given by the community)
by a lot of miners to all switch into other pools whenever this problem arises,

this way those new pools will have more hash and their block intake should increase, it will give them incentive
then just saying "Get out of Ghash" .. those people can see Ghash pulling in block after block, they're not gonna leave.

GHash.IO has taken a block from under the nose of Slush in odd circumstances.  See blocks 280616 and 280617.  Both Slush and GHash.IO reported 280616 at the same time - 12:17:31 - so maybe Slush missed out by a whisker, but just look at the GHash.IO time stamp: at 12:20:06 it's not only considerably later than the report time, but also later than the time and report stamps on 280617!

I'm suspicious.  They snatched two blocks back in December when Slush claimed 275684 and 275792, both being reported before GHash.IO, but in each case when GHash.IO mined the next succeeding block they attached it to their own later fork, orphaning Slush.

Lets all flock to P2Pool and hope P2Pool doesn't go rouge...  :D
It's all a big circle. Too fun to watch.

Nothing suspicious, this is called Selfish Mining.

The wheels are falling off ghash now

8 orphaned/stale/rejected blocks out of the last 77 blocks

https://blockchain.info/block-index/0000000000000000a3148a8588903340bdad49e7e7c2d127c54389c252a05eeb
https://blockchain.info/block-index/00000000000000021908a1679e01b236211710226ae38ba2f17185f976cdd5d0
https://blockchain.info/block-index/0000000000000001e7f22d05c29df9eb3c58f32c573b28236c576021b8437304
https://blockchain.info/block-index/00000000000000014245a97e19599ba06affd1279915ee10189e4494609eb876
https://blockchain.info/block-index/0000000000000000b614413beee558ba56835c230bb27bab951da5590e22cd37
https://blockchain.info/block-index/000000000000000134ae6df18d6792dc72a06632d0d134b2fe9fdbacd1cb7619
https://blockchain.info/block-index/00000000000000023198e09f05e27b0441e1b29ed8e47544df37cd117688a0de
https://blockchain.info/block-index/00000000000000020e14f90c4036355e6f4e3da3706f1120f06f3f031317a398

It may be a much higher percentage than is indicated.
Due to the way the Getblocktemplate (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Getblocktemplate) works it may be possible for ghash to mine its own blocks from within the eligius or triplemining or other pool with this enabled. 

Although the protocol is designed with the purpose of increasing decentralization, it seems capable of also doing the opposite.
Perhaps this protocol can allow a pool owner to mask an existing 51% capability.  If used sufficiently sparingly, would this even be detected?

I doubt. Although GBT allow you to submit any 'syntactically' valid block any pool operator wants to keep control on coinbase tx content at least. If I were a pool op I would implement the check of all other transactions submitted with a block that they match the set of tx previously sent to the gbt client as well. So, there should be no way to submit a block that has any intentionally altered data apart from nonce, extra nonce and possibly block time stamp when protocol allows it. I hope, that eligius op is aware of these possible targets of attack. So, targeting some hash power of the ghash.io on mining over gbt at eligius should not be harmful in any way IMO.

We agree it is unlikely.  Also unlikely is the families of ghash and eligius and btc guild all get kidnapped.  The point of this thread (it appears) is to identify and suggest amelioration techniques for the pool risks in proportion to their likelihood and potential harm.

We don't have transparency on which pools CEX equip is moved to, all this is speculation.  We really don't know the level of danger.

Ah, yes. I did not read your questions as a single one:). However my answer confirms that retargeting hash power most likely may not be identified. So, the level of danger is not known. But it was always like this: any entity that would not like to show it's real capabilities would split its resources among several pools.

Any confirmations on such attacks?

Yes, at the very beginning of the thread. Also, ghash.io/cex.io eventually admitted that it was their staff that did it. After first laughing it off & denying it, then lying about it.

That would scare me a fair bit if they laughed it off and then said we didn't mean anything by it
Guess it means be careful not to give them enough hash to be able to have the option to do that

Oh shit this look so serious if true...

... too late ...

Don't know who should be faulted more: GHash.IO for not curtailing their growth or stupid people in the mining community who are pushing their growth.

I never mined there and the more I learn about their operation the more I'm disgusted by it.

Blame me for not being loud enough of the issue.
And all of us who recognized it and aren't better than we are at shouting loudly into the right megaphones.

Too much polyana because we don't want to scare the new blood may be our downfall.
Awareness of the problems and addressing all of them in all the ways that make sense my lift us up.

WE are responsible.  It is OUR protocol.

This is not looking good for ghash.io :/

OMG. Again this thread.
Original post time:
Let it die for gods sake.
Every time ghas gets close to 50% this thread reapears...like freakin zombie you can't kill. Arn't there enough threads on this subject around? Only 100? Do we need to revive this one every freaking time?

you can kill it by spreading your hashes and by educating new miners on this subject, this will simply prevent things like this from happening and not by ignoring/being angry whenever you see this thread.

I'm very happy that this thread keeps popping up as it can only help new miners in deciding who to trust - and obviously ghash.io/cex.io can't be.

Yup im a new user, and im really happy i found this. Thank you very much.

that's why modo. must use the "locked" feature when a too old threat jump from the cave ...  ;D

I don't see any negative impact from having this thread bumped when we're in the red zone. People can read the thread and form their own opinion of the situation.

I think this thread is important for new members like me and closing it would only harm!

Than put it into "hall of fame" or FAQ or somewhere...dont revive it for fucks sake. Every fucking time i see this title, i think it happened again....

OK, changed the subject so that it won't confuse you if someone necros it again (so long as its a reply from this branch).
Dispelling confusion wherever possible.

Double spending or not, 41% is too much power on single pool. People have to come to their senses and diversify.

Why don't we get a site like coindesk to write about the 51% attack as it would get alot of attention. Maybe this would convince new miners to avoid ghash?

I have a feeling that those miners that have been around for any amount of time (>=3 months) or so have already moved at least some portion of their miners off of ghash.io (I certainly have).

However, I don't think many of the newer miners are going to be interested in switching pools.  Fact is it's just too damn incentivizing to want to mine on a pool not only with 0% fee's, but that also gives you 3 bonus coins at the same time, not to mention solves blocks more frequently than any other pool.  Obviously many other pools do some variation of this but when you start getting a serious influx of miners, interested in nothing but those three little letters R..O..I this is what your gonna get.

My honest opinion is that we should start putting far more serious pressure on some of these other pools to reduce their overall fee's but hey that's just me.

*It would be preferable actually if all pools had 0% fee's and operated on donation(s) only, but those very same people probably couldn't find it within themselves to actually donate even a single satoshi.

https://blockchain.info/pools?timespan=24hrs
Currently in the last 24 hours
80 blocks out of 164 were by GHash.io
(the site will update  each block so when you look it will be different)

hate the game not the player

Ultimately the game, is the game of life.
Some choose not to hate life, but reserve that for those that waste their lifetime, and that of others, doing the unethical.

They are so close for everybody to be at their mercy it is laughable. When will we come to our senses? When they reach 60%? Or 70%?

its the same 50,01% that 99%

why the fukers ghash are playing with this?split the fu}[;'ng coounts NOW

There's no point in getting mad at GHash. They're doing what they think is in their economic interests. Sooner or later someone is going to do that, whether it's GHash or not.

If bitcoin can't survive this, and we also can't fix it, it's fundamentally broken. If it's fundamentally broken, it's better that we find that out sooner rather than later.

Bitcoin is not fundamentally broken, the system just assumes people are not idiots and will not work against their own interest. That assumption is obviously wrong. Majority simply doesn't want to think, it is too painful. It's just much easier to be in a heard. Being in heard is so comfortable, that way somebody else is guilty when shit happens.

You can't successfully, long term, defend any system from the inside. If you are saying that Bitcoin is broken because people depending on a system don't give a shit about the system, then - yes, it is broken. Also is any system who's insiders behave like that.

I guess this comes down to semantics, but "broken if used by the actual humans who will be using it" sounds to me like "broken". Still, I suppose maybe some future AI civilization will be smarter than us monkeys...

I reserve the right to get mad at GHash.io.
It is irresponsible.  It is also unwise.  Those combinations can be maddening.

Imagine that there might be some folks that want Bitcoin to fail.
Imagine that they care more than a little about that goal.
Imagine that those folks might do things, perhaps involving violence.  Maybe things like starting wars and such.
Might something simple like coercion be used to do things with bitcoin mining that we would prefer not happen?


So if any of that imagined stuff is true, then ghash.io is unwise in that they are setting themselves up for such coercion.  In the movies the bad guy would put a knife to the throat of a loved one, but it could take just about any form.

They would be wise to scale back and DECENTRALIZE.

ghash could earn more by ignoring all other pool blocks and just extending on its own chain.
diff would even decrease and they could earn more ;)

Right, or they could charge other miners to accept their blocks...

Its not broken, it just suffers from a classic common resource problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
"... individuals, acting independently and rationally according to each one's self-interest, behave contrary to the whole group's long-term best interests by depleting some common resource."

Historically, only 2 viable solutions exist:
1) An authority to regulate (% in this case)
2) Privatization

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Modern_solutions

Pick your poison..... but be quick about it.


Ref: "The Tragedy of the Commons". Science 162 (3859): 1243–1248. 1968. doi:10.1126/science.162.3859.1243

They would not earn more in terms of fiat. If they were to attempt this kind of attack then the price of bitcoin would decrease substantially and what they mined on their own chain would be worthless.

i am not sure about this.
it was definatly true in the beginning: but now? too much investors...

There's no need for violence or a war, for failure of gigantic proportions, one hacker attack is enough. We've put ourselves in a position that we have a single point of failure, and if somebody gets hold of GHash.IO resources he can break the blockchain.



Both solutions are unacceptable, I'd rather see Bitcoin fail than degrade it like that. Fortunately, we have some other options that were not there in the history. We have the source code, remember. Consensus can be reached to change it in  a way to remove this threat. Core developers have to quickly reach consensus what to do.

If you would rather it fail then degrade then why are you even bothering with BTC Yes their was some double spends and GH are closing in on the 51% hash rate again maybe see it happen again and they make claims that they have nothing to do with it. I have since moved well away from their pool due to the fact that when you mine with own equipment I get nothing but stale dupes and rejected for about 40% of my work yet anywhere else is flawless. Rented hash their is fine tho so I don't get how the hell own hardware gets many rejected stale when all other pools I mine on are perfectly fine. Tried to contact support several times asked me to do may things. In the end I gave up and went elsewhere. Bitcoin will always some how get degraded no matter what that's fact.

This is even more true now.

Ghash makes a lot of money off of selling their GH/s on cex, if they were executing a 51% attack why would anyone want to deal with them again once the network recovers.

The hitch is that what individual human decision-makers do can be quite far removed from what you'd think would be in the rational best interests of the conpany. For instance, if you're a manager who has promised $x in revenue for this quarter and you think you'll lose your job if you don't make it, you'll be motivated to do whatever it takes to make that number, even if you secretly think it harms the company long-term.

Also they may be coerced into doing things they don't want to. Conceivably the moment they hit 51% they became legally obliged to do all kinds of AML-related censorship that they don't really want to do. Like somebody said about Google, it's all very well having the motto "Don't be evil", but if you accrue too much power, evil will find you...

This may be true about the manager wanting to get x amount of revenue for the company for a pool that earns revenue from pool fees, but ghash does not. As far as I know the only source of revenue that ghash makes is from selling it's equipment via cloud mining.

One solution would be to provide more incentives to pools as long as they are under a certain threshold.

One way this could be achieved wold be to change the Bitcoin code so that if a pool had found more then x% of blocks in the last 24 hours then they only get 98% of the block reward, and pools that have found less then x% of the blocks in the last 24 hours would receive the 2% that the other pools did not earn the previous day.

For example on day 0 PoolA finds 60 blocks out of 144 blocks found that day, this is above the threshold of x% of blocks found. On day 1 PoolA finds 59 blocks out of 144 blocks found that day. They receive 24.5 BTC per block for a total block reward of 1445.50 across 59 blocks. They received 29.5 BTC less then if they had received a block reward of 25 BTC. Starting on day 2 any pool that mines a block that does not have hashpower above x would earn ~25.415 BTC (plus TX fees) per block found until the 29.5 "lost" block reward is used up.

This.  However, the last time I looked at P2Pool myself (I was just a small miner mostly for fun, now I've even switched off completely), the "problem" I noticed most was that with my hash rate, I wouldn't even be able to consistently get returns out of P2Pool.  I don't know how many of the current GHash.io miners have such a low hash rate, though.

Clearly the free market has dictated that GHash can grow to its size. Stop trying to fight the invisible hand by DDOSing GHash. You dont like it? Start up a competitor.

This place is the worst, everyone cries about FREE MARKET and BAD GOVT REGULATION but suddenly when they aren't at the top of the food chain it turns into "DDOS THEM TO DEATH", "WE NEED REGULATIONS!", "HARDFORK THE PROTOCOL!"

Working on it. Project launch will be probably less than two months.

The DDOS is a market circumstance, only the best pools will survive, those who are able to competitively deal with all adversities.

P2P miners do not control enough hashpower to really make them viable as they rely too much on luck.

While P2P is a noble idea, traditional pools are here to stay, at least IMO

If CEX can double spend, or 51% attack or whathave you......the problem seems to be with bitcoin itself, not any one user. CEX seem to be good guys, what happens if bad guys develop the same power.

Good or Bad, they are subject to coercion.
Centralization of power is bad for bitcoin, it destroys its value, it adds trust relationships where they don't belong.

CEX is unwise for allowing themselves to get to this point, that alone, even if it doesn't make them "bad" and "untrustworthy", they need to be better than this.
They do not have the power to resist the coercive forces at play in the world, and either have too much hubris to see the truth of that, or are already compromised.  Either way, there are evidently necessary improvements needed.  Yes, in the protocol, as well as in the wisdom and responsibility of those that would hold its reins.

Why don't just fund a pool ? We have a lof of new millionaires in dollars with BTC.

centralization of mining pools are not a technical problem, its a people problem

I don't agree on the GUI part. No serious IT infrastructure would trust a GUI. What's actually needed is that current dominant mining applications (bfgminer, cgminer) incorporate p2p component. That would bring p2p usage to new heights.

And eliminate pools ! :) F U multi pools ! ;D

I've been mulling this over for some time now..

Well yes, I just don't know why this isn't being worked on more quickly. Pools were never needed IMO.

In my experience it is easier to fix technology than to fix people.
Make the technology easier (such as adding the p2p pool options to cgminer and guiminer as suggested above) and that fixes lots of people, when the issues are understood.

Adding in merge mining options, and other profit generating activities that the pools can offer and it become easier and more rewarding.

People are more inclined to do the right thing when the right thing is not too hard for them, and doesn't cost too much.

Some people that have money to invest in miners are less technically inclined and might not be comfortable using a program that only uses "command lines"

I agree that having a GUI is useful to those who are less technically as I.

You could use a GUI that could display the output that your command line program would display in a more "user friendly" format. The GUI could also change settings that you would need to type manually in your command line program. The command line verson of the program could then run in the background and the GUI would only need to be open when the user is interacting and/or watching it.

Having both a CLI and GUI, everyone could choose.
Why argue against the creation of such a choice, easier to just write it.

Anyone using Ghash.io at this point is NOT helping bitcoin.

Whats up with the addy pools ?

http://blockchain.info/pools?timespan=24hrs

Everything I read about this did seem fishy and looked to check out.

Blockchain.info is openly accepting submits.
Hope those are curated.
https://twitter.com/aantonop/status/480033600872914945

It looks like these pools are "unknown" pools but all of the mining proceeds are being sent to the same address.

It appears that blockchain.info is trying to make their pool stats more accurate.