Bitcoin Forum

I planned to ask this question a week ago, not that much time to check on the forum and I planned to let it drop till I saw it happening again,  and I'm starting to think it a more common occurrence that I'm being able to observe normally. It was stated numerous times that the best way to make sure a transaction is not reversed would be to wait for at last 6 confirmation, and I saw that Foundry managed twice to get six blocks in a row, like in this example (this was the first):
https://www.talkimg.com/images/2024/05/20/14gId.png
and again yesterday
https://www.talkimg.com/images/2024/05/20/14efj.png

If they managed to get that many in a row this open the possibility of an attack in vase they are hacked, one single individual could invalidate thousands of transaction on top of double spending his funds, dealing not only a financial blow but what I think worse a credibility blow to the network, so how can we make sure pools don't get so much power and convince miners to move to smaller pools to avoid concentration of power and ensure decentralization?
Would there be possible to make a signalling service that would alert miners if a pool goes above 20% to switch to a lower hashrate one, much like in the days of GPU mining when you could switch the coins you were mining based on profits?

And then they get sued into oblivion for breaching their fiduciary duty to their large mining clients by causing a massive price drop in BTC and then everyone stops mining there and then.......

It's happened before and will happen again, not worth worrying about.

F2 pool was large got close to 50% an people left.
IIRC there was another pool around that same time that (ghash? it's been a while don't remember) got a little to large for people and miners moved.

-Dave

If censor transactions becomes a new standard in Bitcoin mining industry by mining pools themselves or by government enforcement, it will be threat for decentralization.

If it only comes from a single mining pool, it will be not a threat for decentralization.

LukeDashjr and Jack Dorsey proposed to censor transactions because of Ordinals but this idea is opposed by Bitcoin community, because it is not good for decentralization.

Bitcoin Developer's Proposal to Stop 'Spam' NFTs Gets Shut Down (https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2024/01/09/bitcoin-developers-proposal-to-stop-spam-nfts-gets-shut-down/)

I was envisioning more of a malicious attack or some rogue element, not the actual bosses of the company destroying their own probably very good paid job.


That is nice, my concern was that mining companies might be tied to their pools by some contracts and less willing to hop to another pool since they would lose money.


I'm not familiar with the ordinals problem and not technically astute enough to understand that but I'm a bit afraid of things that promote restrictions as being good for the freedom of others, I don't see any utility in ordinals or runes but I don't feel like empowering someone to decide what's better for me.

I do not know if this was intended by the people from Ordinal or not.  If it was an intended strategy to disrupt the Community AND the Network, they did a good job.

You get a very sharp double sided blade.  On one side you get supporting Decentralization at the cost of every thing we have to suffer from because of Ordinals.  On the other side you can push Ordinals out.  But it sets a precedent and Censoring will be much closer to the tip of the finger of people.  And if you agreed to that just so you could spend Bitcoin cheaper, more often and with less headache.  Then are you NOT going to agree Censoring Transactions known for being particularly suspicious and possibly illegal?

But then.  If a flaw is discovered, it has to be solved.  Ordinals are not necessarily a flaw, but they are a parasite to the Bitcoin Blockchain and we kind of need an anti parasitic solution for it.  You could think of solving the biggest Bitcoin flaws as precedents too, but it is not the case.  Maybe pushing Ordinals out of the game is not a bad idea overall, but who knows.  Bitcoin is way too large to know and calculate the consequences.

I have always assume it that the major problem or obstacle that will stop the removal of ordinals is that it will definitely tamper with decentralization if they want to censor it. The censoring wouldn’t be that transparent going forward. For example it will kind of migrate to even normal bitcoin transactions, censorship is pure decentralization so another option is to be seek rather than that.

Even a single mining pool with large hashrate is a threat to decentralization too if they decide to censor transactions, the higher the power the higher chances of mining the next block of which means they are set to get new block faster than other miners which is bad if they censor transactions

Agreed.

Unless they've got what it takes to keep their miners with them even at a really critical rate then @DaveF is right, it will happen again and then they're going to get sued, another pool will pop up to gather them and then things will go back to where it was, if this fear that you've got with Foundry is going to be real, I hope that the price of bitcoin goes down to a really low level because I want to buy as much bitcoin with my stock fiat here.

That reminds me of rogue GHash employer to manipulate/scam casino. Anyway, double spend attack could be detected easily these days and news media eager to publish news about such attack. So i expect some miner would switch to different pool or the company halt their pool operational shortly after the attack has been detected.