Bitcoin Forum

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Who cares about the 45% Ghash.io have - will you care when they are at 51%?

Nearly nobody is discussing about that time Ghash.io hit that high level against.

Why? Isn't it a problem? ( remember 7th Janurary what happend to the price and what Ghash.io tolds us on 9th ....)


Update:
"Who cares about double spend. The more important risk is jamming up the system indefinitely by not allowing transactions through, or implementing white lists by only allowing certain transactions through from preapproved addresses.?"

I'm really surprised more people aren't talking about this or doing something about it. 

45% it's already very dangerous, it gives you very good chance of double spending, look at this Analysis of Hashrate-Based Double Spending (especially page 10).

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.2009v1.pdf

I do think it's an issue and to be honest I'm not particularly impressed with Ghash's response, or lack there of.

Especially when you compare it to the quick and effective response of BTC Guild when they were in the 40% bracket.

Some people have speculated that Ghash has mining power that totals above 50% already but their mining it off pool in order to avoid attention. I'm not saying that's true, but if they did end up with over 50% of the hashing power that would seem like it would be the most rational thing to do economically speaking(if and only if the public had no knowledge of it happening).

>50% attacks are real and should be taken seriously by the community. Even the threat of one is enough to seriously harm bitcoin in the eyes of the public. I don't even want to imagine what sort spin these modern media companies would put on it.

I only care about 66,6% (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=619621.msg6860068#msg6860068)

We need a usable p2pool software so that everyone starts mining. It's the only way, we need decentralized mining. We need it easy to install & configure, clean and with intuitive gui.

No we don't.
The miners are already ran by the biggest nerds.
There is probably a big disadvantage for p2pool which we don't know yet.

I also think there will be a 66,6% attack which will move the miners to p2pool finally.
It will be the silk road event which brought us to stratospheric heights last time.

This has already happened before and people did talk about it. Ghash basically just pointed their miners away and did it by themselves. They lowered it/turned off some miners or something but it was resolved in good faith a few times before in other places too.

It may however weaken Bitcoin enough for another innovative cryptocurrency to jump it. Presumably one which is more resilient to 51% attacks.

Not when there is almost no damage done.
Perhaps the miners will switch back to the latest blockchain state right before the first double spends.
All spends after the fork are then lost or people should charge back the BTC or send the item back they bought or pay again, or something.
Does it makes sense what I say?

Here some other frighten things about double and possible double spends:

My coins were stolen in the middle of the night and I don't know how
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/27jsy3/my_coins_were_stolen_in_the_middle_of_the_night/ (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/27jsy3/my_coins_were_stolen_in_the_middle_of_the_night/)


GHash.IO & double spending
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/279sex/ghashio_double_spending/ (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/279sex/ghashio_double_spending/)

Selfish Mining: A 25% Attack Against the Bitcoin Network
http://bitcoinmagazine.com/7953/selfish-mining-a-25-attack-against-the-bitcoin-network/ (http://bitcoinmagazine.com/7953/selfish-mining-a-25-attack-against-the-bitcoin-network/)

I believe the problem lies in many areas.
More hashing power = more blocks solved = more money. Everyone is mining for money
The pools that have decent hashing power where you can still make money but it averages out longer
have shitty fees so people don't want to mine there.
The ones that keep mining there do it for various reasons from loyalty to laziness to explore different pool options.
The pools that have what I consider excellent terms have no hashing power yet and you might as well be solo mining.
P2Ppools are good but might as well solo mining if you don't have much hashing power and have higher than 30 ms latency to the pool.
Ghash took it to the next level by selling could mining and exchanging currencies as well as multipool profit.
So any new pools or existing pools need to step their game up I believe.
Some pools haven't updated their site since they opened as a pool years ago.
When you make creative criticisms people tell you to go start your own pool.
It's a circle jerk imnsho

You still need ASICs do mine now through. And you can't expect everyone to purchase chips and boards that become outdated in two months.

The mining part of bitcoin has definitely veered off course from it's original intention.

one of the best comments I read!

yes. And think about what will happen in 5 years. Maybe only 4 companys will control it and beginning only to accept transaction from ppl who have a registered adress giving them from their gov.

....as more I think about these stuff....o_0

you cant spent coins from another person with a 51%.

the "funny" part is, that you also can do it with less % .....

That's actually a really interesting hypothetical. I've never heard or thought of something like that before.

What would happen if the government did go after mining pools in someway? Forcing them to reject certain transactions. It could start with terrorism, or drugs, and then lead to who knows what.

I guess the easy answer would be to have mining pools operating out of friendly countries, but who knows how many of those, if any, there will be.

I'm not paranoid, nor do I think this is necessarily likely, but it's something that does not seem outside the realm of possibility.

As soon we became support from ppl who are normaly against things like what bitcoin stand for, it could be a confirm.

....looks like it's everthing normal for the most.  ???

Ghash.io can have 100% for all I care because no one is stupid enough to destroy a money maker that they have such a large stake in for a silly double spend. They are making a small fortune every day. Besides that in a few short years mining will be so prohibitively expensive that only a small handful of businesses will be doing it anyway. Decentralization will die with mining first. The security of the network is destined to be centralized.

Ghas.io was closer to 51% than this, and they stopped accepting new miners to prevent 51% happening. And as saomeone else said before me, why would they destroy something that's making them shitload of money.

As soon as you get rid of Bitcoin with its heavy legacy, your concerns will be gone and you can sleep well at night knowing that no evil entity can compromise the mining pools, disrupt network operation and/or force miners to anything. NXT is the future, it has fixed Bitcoin's faults, which will always come to haunt users of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is just an overpriced monster at this point, smart crypto money is moving into NXT. Ok, enough of this shameless promotion of NXT, you are all smart individuals, you can make your own informed decisions.

Because it's a lot easier for an organization (let say China or USA) to threat one big group of people than hundred of small one...

I definitely think this is a huge problem.
Bitcoin is already centralized basically. One cant even participate a tiny little bit if one doesn't have expensive rigs, asics etc.

I don't think NXT is the solution, though it is definitely interesting.

In theory it can take as little as one pissed off employee. Although I've no idea how cex.io and their internal controls look from inside.

It's a bit comforting that the rate dropped to 43%, maybe they're doing something about it.

Eventually, if you keep using Bitcoin, you are going to trust the businesses that take over mining whether you like it or not.

i wonder if htey'd really fuck over BTC just like that.. especially if they have some invested in btc.

I don't see them doing that. It would end up costing them more than they could ever expect to gain/

I remember ghash was close to 50% before and it doesn't amaze me that they are there again.

Ghash.io remains the best pool, and  no other  pool comes close.


To have a real long-term solution there need to be other pools that offer the same or better benefits as ghash.io:

Very low fees
Share the transaction fee income between miners (some pools keep it to themselves, which is ridiculous)
Clear stats on your hashrate and income
Automatic payout, preferably split between shareholders
API support to check your hashrate from mobile or browser plugin
Reliablilty
Total pool hashing power (to decrease variance)
Merged mining (=free extra money) preferably with automatic cash out or even automatic exchange to bitcoin


As long as ghash.io remains a far better pool than the competitors they will have way more hashrate

I would prefer if no single pool has more than 20% of hashrate, but there just arent enough pools that offer similar benefits.

The truth is that proof of work leads inevitably to a single hasher-pleasing dominant mining pool. The hashers have sufficient trust in that pool to permit a 51% attack, that hashers think is not a threat. Hashers have observed that the pools are well behaved, and those pools are efficient due to competition. The dominant pools knows that if there is misbehavior they will be possibly ruined by deserting hashers.

Thus proof-of-work as a means to secure the Bitcoin blockchain now fails Satoshi's design of a system in which there is no trusted third party. .

I suggest a better system in a discussion thread elsewhere on this forum.

....and we're over 45%  now  :o

I don't even mine in Ghash.io . IMO its not very good site, there are a lot better sites with great support than Ghash.io .
Kindly,
        Muhammed Zakhir

jep, and the problem is, that Ghash.io own the hardware. There aren't so miner real miners. Most is done by themself

There are a lot of miners with hardware pointed at ghash. They provide good stats and the pool is more profitable. It stands to reason that more people would use them.

Thank you for linking this. According to the figures in the analysis (and with the assumptions it states being true), an attacker with 44% of the network hashrate has a 68.282% chance of successfully carrying out a double-spend attack, if the transaction has 6 confirmations. If you only wait for 3 confirmations, the chance of success goes up to 77.715%.

Thanks again, very interesting read.

FYI:  That never happened.  At no point in GHash's history have they halted registrations to prevent a 51% hash rate.  The only pool to ever do so was BTC Guild, and it did so at 45% of the network.  And the difference there was 100% of BTC Guild's hash rate was public, no private mining farm.  GHash.io continues to control a private mining farm of 40-50% of it's pool speed if not more, while trying to get more people to join their pool which has 0 economic sense behind it unless they plan on double spending or stealing from users (they're literally throwing money away to operate a public pool, spending time supporting people, and paying for servers, and gaining NOTHING from it).

This is crazy and I probably will get downvoted. But could a DDoS attack to the pool be organized somehow by the community? It would have to last long enough to make enough people leave cex.io though.

First, this isn't Reddit you can't be down voted. Second, that's illegal and we wouldn't want to get together and plan an illegal activity in front of all the LEOs that read this forum every day.

There's probably too much money and power invested in the PoW infrastructure at this point for any real progress to be made. I appreciate what you're doing personally, but bitcoin is becoming an old dinosaur incapable of change or self criticism.

.....hmmm I see the self critcism everywhere. Not as much as it should be but it's still there.

Switch to Mintcoin.  :D

30x faster than Bitcoin.
Most energy efficient.

not the worst idea.

But it's still contains the concept: the riches gone richer

The sad thing is that there is a good chance they will reach 51% because of apathetic miners who will stay with the pool and just expect the other guy to leave.

The thing is that it's quite possible they will just shift mining power outside of Ghash.io and still have over 50% but not have it show up that way on blockchain.info or anywhere else that tracks those statistics. It might be happening now, but who knows really.

This should be a much bigger issue than it is. BTC Guild already set the standard for how a pool should act under these circumstances, it would be good to see Ghash follow their lead.

Exactly.

It's not a matter of caring.  It's a matter of not really being able to do anything about it.  Ghash.io has rate is mostly their own.  And if they reach 51% on their own hash rate what can anyone do?  What should anyone do?

If that happens then bitcoin price will fall.  Hopefully they are only interested in making revenue for their company.  Because if that is the case then they will mine until the price crash's and then quit or tapper back dramatically and move onto the next "get rich quick" scheme.

So Bitcoin will correct itself using market forces or it won't.  To exert other pressure on an entity to do what you/we want them to is an assault on human dignity and is the antithesis of the principles of Bitcoin if the first place.

So let Bitcoin go through its own correction or let it die on it's own merits.  Micromanaging the network will be a failure in the least a disaster at the most.

Sorry if these thoughts have already been posted.  I don't really feel like reading this whole thread.

maybe the developers need to add code to throttle nodes that start to encroach on the 50% mark.
So regardless if a node can hash over 50% of the network it won't matter.
How they can do that I don't know and I'm not sure if it's even wise to do so.
I'm sure it was considered if I thought about it :P

Exactly the kind of micromanagement that will kill Bitcoin.

I don't know if this particular idea is a solution or not, but the alternative is doing nothing and killing bitcoin through lack of management.

How do you consider that micromanagement? DO you propose to not do a thing and expect
the the pool operator to play nice? Head in the sand mentality?

Yes, that is what I said in my above post.

What else can be done realistically.  We need Bitcoin because here in the U.S. the politicians took our currency off the gold standard with which has damaged our economy and allows politicians aka government to manipulate our markets.

So like I said Bitcoin will manipulate according to the originally established rules and succeed or it will not be able to adapt and will die.  If Bitcoin needs to micromanaged to stay alive then it is just as susceptible to manipulation as the U.S. currency and is no better and then won't be useful anyway.

I disagree on how you are using the word micromanagement here. Managed yes micro'd no.
It's nothing more than adding another safeguard to preserve the currency.

Very severe. we should act as a community.

Mechanisms to deal with large hashers that approach 51% are already in place.  When an entity reaches that point and they are deemed to not be trustworthy, that will cause the value to decrease.  When the value decreases then they no longer have an incentive to have that much hash power running and will stop.

Modifying the way Bitcoin works to prevent someone, you don't like, from reaching a certain percentage is what I would call micromanagement.  Once the precedent is set who is to say what that magic percentage that no one entity should be allowed to reach.  51% isn't the number that double spends are possible, that can be done with a much smaller percentage.

I'd be shocked if ghash.io hasn't been above 50% already for months.  It's against their interest for people to know they're > 50%, the solution is to simply submit blocks through unconnected IPs without a block sig that would identify them as ghash.io.

add:  It's not like they're relying 100% on people mining on their pool.  You'd have to be naive to think they wouldn't obfuscate the identity of blocks discovered by their massive ASIC farm.

You mean the price of Bitcoin decreases and the big hasher stops hashing that much? I wouldn't call it a 'mechanism to deal with large hashers', because everybody is punished proportionately with the decrease of the price (smaller miners may be punished even more than big ones). If that is the only 'mechanism', it's as good as none.

Finally, someone gets it.

The invisible hand of the market is more like the invisible fist?

I say bullshit. The value didn't decreased before when it happened before. The pool operator took actions. Which they didn't have to do.
w/e You'll disagree to disagree.

I'm assuming your talking about BTCGuild?  If so that is a reputable pool that cares about Bitcoin.  I'm not saying that Ghash isn't.  I'm just saying if an untrusted entity did get majority control the network bitcoin value would fall.  Then that entity would have to decide whether they wanted to continue to mine at a loss or not.


I'm just saying throttling entities to a certain percentage of blocks found would/could do more damage and defeat the purpose of Bitcoin.

look all the other pools need to do is implement a secondary solo pool.  it takes away the edge of ghash


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27062.msg7197340#msg7197340


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=645488.0


it would certainly dilute ghash.io if 5 big pools offered this option.  It would also allow for old 'useless' gear to still have a value