Bitcoin Forum

https://blockchain.info/pools

GHash.IO has the highest hash rate now.

Depends on which time frame you look at currently.  Until more ASICs ship this will probably be the case though, hard to compete with a pool that personally controls roughly 20% of the network hash rate in their private farm.

And has 0% fee with merged mining.

And that raises no red flags with anyone?

But a pool that charges a reasonable fee gets inundated with demands to start kicking off paying customers.  Seems like an unfair double standard to me.

And admits that under previous developers it misused its mining to perform double-spend attacks?

Please don't hurt me.. I was just being sarcastic..

Is ghosh.io really private ? Who are they I'm still wonder

Why private? Hello I'm just a regular guy and I'm minning in that pool xd
I think is not that private o.O

They're not fully private, but they own roughly 1 PH/s worth of hardware, which is (approximately) 20% of the network.  That's the "private 20% of the network" I was referring to.  They are the largest single miner in the entire Bitcoin ecosystem.

Okay then how do you join?

What if cex.io just run off with everybodys bitcoins. What kind of domain is .io  anyway??

Who the hell are these guys?

Also where do you get the news that this Ghash.io website now has 20% market share?

Isn't that the pool that sells those ghashes on some site for like 3-4x value?

Hard to imagine that that's even more lucrative than selling ASICs, but I guess so

Or look at http://blockorigin.pfoe.be/chart.php - more than 26%. This is supposedly more accurate (see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=304488.0).

That is quite... disturbing. I really don't understand why people even use cex.io.

i quit using cex since they implemented fees.   but before  that i did pretty well day trading ghs  :)

The pool fee (ghash.io) is 0%
The only fee they charge in CEX.io is for the cloud based GHS and is quite insignificant (arround 1.3%)

They won't as long the bitcoin business runs. They'r hardware fee is dynamic depending on their costs.
Means that they'r earning alot with this dynamic fee >3%.

GHS Available 15389. Total BTC available: 528.96736640

I can help you understand.

I run a meager 20 ghs hardware rig at home consisting of USB erupters, blue furies, BFL jalapeño and some  HD Radeon for ltc. Putting this together, keep it running, dealing with wife who wants to throw all my computer junk away at any opportunity is NOT for a faint of heart.

I read all this bashing of cex.io for several months and really believed that the bitcointalk collective wisdom was serving me well. Then just one day out of curiosity I looked at their website. They claimed for 0.07 btc I could buy 1 virtual ghs. That was 3x cheaper than let's say AM erupter per gh. So I decided, wth I will spend 1 btc (it was $400). So suddenly, I had almost doubled my hashrate in a blink of an eye.

I kept checking the payouts and they were fine. Then in the last few weeks Elegius where I mined with my HW at home started fail cascading. I pointed my HW at home to my GHash.IO user name. It's like any other pools, no magic - cgminer/bfgminer don't care.

Then another strange thing happened. The price of virtual GHs jumped to 0.087. I sold 1 GHs making 0.08 "profit" while still having technically speaking same 1 btc in my virtual hardware. Virtual GHs went down to 0.065 now and I bought some of it back. The major point of this exercise was that I can generate btc via mining and I have an incredible liquidity of my "mining hardware". I sold about ten Radeons via eBay in the past and believe me, it's a pain in the butt to deal with that entire scheme of buying and selling real equipment . cex.io made it VERY EASY for a small miner like me to be a part of this endeavor.

I will not pretend having any sacral knowledge of GHash.IO HW assets, but judging from my example half of the reported hash rate comes from individual users running it at homes. 

Here is the stats for my cex.io, half real and half virtual:
http://cex.io/informer/BorisFive/07fce135357da04a27a766c0f01f0390/ (https://cex.io/r/0/BorisFive/0/)

I hope this shed some light on why people like me are loving this new service.

So, in other words, you'd be loving any service that allows you to make money, regardless of how it operates? No matter that it could be a sort of pyramid scheme or something of that kind?

The 'cloud mining' services are evil. Period. If you care about bitcoins you hold, you should care about mining centralization too. These services centralize mining even more, I don't even mention ridiculous prices and absence of any guarantees that these GH/s even exist and aren't being used to perform malicious activity.

People should stop being narrow-minded and see a greater picture, not just look for a quick profit.

I can't see 50btc in this pie chart. wtf? are they out of business or just variance?

The moment you tell people why they "should be" or what they "should do", you lost the game. It's that simple. I do not care about you or your principles. I care about my small (business) profit. Period.

Do I care about bitcoins I hold? Yes. Not very much because I never spent any more than I can lose, but I still care, if just for the sake of amusement. You see, I am here as a member of the general public, who never drank the cool aid of libertarian moneys. Bitcoin is no longer in the realm of really smart computer geeks blabbering about virtues of cryptos. I am here to make my small (business) money. If you thought it will forever be in that other realm, well sorry man, the rabbit is out. If Bitcoin fails, oh well. 99.9% of the population, me included are not going to cry. We will blame (someone) for our own stupidity. That's the game.

CEX.IO and Ghash.IO offer my small business a better ROI. If you have anything better, I am all ears.

Please, do tell me, why virtual GHs in any way worse than "real" GHs I run in my basement? Is the return lower? No.

YOUR PROBLEM is that you are trying to tell me what I "should do", instead of going and opening another cloud based service. In the world where every Bitcoin mining farm is a cloud based one, who has the "evil advantage"? Nobody.

To sum this up, CEX.IO offers the best deal for my business at this time. When something better comes along, I will consider it.

And please, don't kill the messenger. I am trying to explain what's going on. Have you seen the hash distribution rate lately? Here is your clue. You are free to accept or ignore it. Sorry.

Well I didn't want to say that people "should do" something, it could happen because I'm not english native.

By the way if you re-read my post, you'll understand that I'm not pushing my opinion, I'm telling facts.

Does hashrate centralization increase risks to the network? Yes, it does.
Do increased risk to the network increase risks to your BTC holdings value? Yes, it does.
Do you care about your BTC holdings value? Well, it's up to you, but the rational approach would be to care.
So, what's the rational approach for a holder? To support centralization, or to resist it?
Logically if you don't have bitcoins and only want to make fiat profit, you don't care, but it changes completely when you are a holder and want BTC to perform well.

Now about could mining. I didn't think I'd need to explain the differences between having actual hardware and virtual hashrate.
When you have hardware, you just HAVE IT. You can point it to any pool or p2pool, you can basically VOTE with your hashpower. And you won't lose it you the pool is going bankrupt. You are allowed to operate it in a trustless way, like mining on p2pool.

When you have virtual hashrate (it's more like mining shares), you can do neither of the above. (Note that I don't mean hosted mining, it's a different story.) But some risks appear. You can't be sure that your hashrate actually exists, you can't be sure that the market isn't manipulated, you even can't be sure that your hashrate will be worth something in case of service bankruptsy. And you can't be sure that your hashrate isn't being used to perform double-spends (CEX confirmed that their hashrate was used to do this).

Yes, it may look like a good investment (though at this price I doubt so), but at the expense of network security.

I am not an English speaker also. That's cool.

Now that the bitcoin is out there in the wild, people will do whatever people do. A joe-shmo like myself who has not written a single line of code in 7 years will try to grab and run with a piece of it. It's a wild ride ahead. Anything that will create even a small advantage for public to make money, can and will be used against bitcoin.

I think we exhaustively answered the question of "why people use cex.io" :)

Yep, but my point is that it's short-sighted and risky. It may be profitable, but it's bad for Bitcoin. At least people could avoid shooting themselves in the feet.

Shit where you eat and pee where you drink.

The hell with network security... I'm making $ buy getting tons of these BTC which.... are now......  worth....... nothing  ::)

First to hear about this pool, is it reliable.

Reliable, and has a tempting 0% pool fee (compared to BTC Guild's 3%).

So if you have your own mining hardware, you keep 100% of the BTC you mine :D