Bitcoin Forum

At 50% over the last 24 hours.  This is rounded to the nearest 1%.  So it is likely over 50%.
https://blockchain.info/pools?timespan=24hrs

Why is that whenever this crisis starts ,it accelerates and more and more people join the pool rather than leaving it?

It just dropped to 49%.  Immediate disaster averted.

This is a very good question.

"Hey, everyone else is mining over there.  It must be better!"

And back up to 50% again.

And 49% again.  They're on the edge and keep flipping.

When it hits 51% BTC explodes

Lol.  51% is just a figure of speech.  You only need 50.0000000000000000000000000000000000000001% to attack.  They've reached that and have not attacked as of yet.

You can attempt double spends at 20-30-40%

It's all based on probability and how deep the transaction is in the chain.

They are back up to 50% right now. This is horrible, everyone should stop using GHASH.IO right now.

Do you guys think it is an accident that the GHash is where it is right now? I mean, I believe the majority of its hashing power is from big professional miners (they know what they are doing), not small hobbyists....

If you look at the service they offer, you'll see a blatant reason why this happens (one of many actually). From a competitive business perspective, they've covered all bases - cloud mining contracts, hardware mining, merged mining, and then trade it like a commodity on cex.io. One-stop-shop business model that nobody else offers; at least, not as well executed :D

Visit https://ghash.io/ (https://ghash.io/) and see for yourself.

Yes, I know their business model. Still, I would assume they have several +50TH/s professional miners there.

I think I'm going to spend some HODLED bitcoins on a non GHash.io cloud miner. Any suggestions..?

It happened: https://blockchain.info/double-spends

Ghash is moving between 50 and 49%... New people registering most definitely, and then GHash shuts down their own units.

No doubt the permabulls and nutters will sweep this under the carpet. It's a gigantic clusterfuck.

The problem is it actually is better than any of the alternatives. I wonder why nobody set up a pool that can actually compete.

The ghash.io thing where people keep joining ghash faster it gets closer to 51% reminds me of the movie Untraceable where a serial killer ties up his victims and puts them on a Youtube feed with a system where the more people that are watching a video, the faster the victim dies,  and then millions of viewers exponentially pile in to watch, brutally killing the victim.

http://iv1.lisimg.com/image/307421/600full-untraceable-poster.jpg

There is some gore but it's not a just a gore movie - it is a movie about human psychology and how greedy people are, because everyone insists on watching the movie, which contributes to the victim dying.

Same thing is the observer effect with people who stand by when someone is in a crisis,   and same thing as people who don't vote.  People only think about their individual impact and aren't confident about the collective impact as a group - everyone feels they are an exception.

As their hashrate stays around 51%, some people are selling for fiat as a hedge. But I believe some may choose to buy other cryptos, also as a hedge,
so if it gets worse we may see BTC / USD down while other cryptos could go up (at least compared with BTC).
If the downtrend continues, then even if GHash won't exploit their 51% (or higher), they would have proved it's possible to manipulate the price down.

+1
I believe PoS coins will profit the most from this.

I've found in my experience that a vast amount of bitcoiners are completely against the idea of new cryptocurrency technology. I think a lot of the people buying altcoins are already in to altcoins. The amount of new altcoin tech hate you seen on places like reddit is astonishing.

I don't think the Blockchain.info chart is very accurate. I finally found this link to a better chart someone posted the last time this topic came up. I doubt GHash.io is anything to worry about yet: http://blockorigin.pfoe.be/chart.php (http://blockorigin.pfoe.be/chart.php)

That averages the last 2 weeks.  You only need >50% for about 10 minutes to double spend.

I dont know why the private miners are still into gigahash, they should have moved to other pool long ago, or do solomining.

I have to be honest, that was some scary moment for me  ???.

If GHash.io just turned off or throttled down their equipment, that does not solve the problem, merely hides it.  The risk exists when an entity is capable of doing X% of the hash rate, not only when it does that.

Who are the people controlling GHash.io?

I know about Jeff and his relation to CEX.IO: https://twitter.com/jeff_smith01
Probably has something to do with GHash.IO as well.

I thought that he was just their PR person?

+1

A whois request gives Alex Luts as the person who the domains are registered to.

People who still vote are suckers. In the states it's the people who fund elections that have the real power, and in EU countries the only vote of any meaning is the vote to get out of EU. And we don't get to vote on that. Even in a hypothetical world where votes actually counted, we can't reverse the current decline in less than 50 years.

Democracy should replace voting with a Proof of Human Work inspired by Bitcoin :P and that work should be hard, like lifting weights in the gym.

Doyouevenlift?coin

Proof of Workout

Start it up :P

Local political party already did a vote with blockchain-based tech. Dunno details, but just the possibility of introducing actual democracy where votes can't be forged or "misplaced" is amazing.

chilling analogy

it's a pretty good movie, i remember watching it with my ex.

but it's indeed a bit like the GHASH situation indeed, but in their defense, GHASH is still the best pool by far.

<tinfoilhat>
What if GHASH pays other pools to remain unattractive to miners?
</tinfoilhat>

What if someone wants to kill bitcoin simply pays more to miners than Ghash?

Logic and market forces should have dictated that a competitor matching GHash.io in terms of services and abilities would have popped up by now. The fact that this hasn't happened and people are crying foul about a superior service being flocked to and dominating instead of the other mining pools says a fair bit about this community and Bitcoin mining in general, and of an obvious elephant in the room that no one has dared considered mentioning until now. If anything, I'm surprised some of the smaller pools that have been around for a few years haven't considered merging to counter GHash.io instead of just sitting twiddling their thumbs like they have been for the past few months everytime the hashrate on GHash.io has soared close to 50% and crying "Woe is me".

TL;DR the community has only its complacency to blame for.

Eligious pool and slush should have been merged at this point now, anyway they are going down in hashrate eveyrmonth, if they dont do anything they will just dissapear in a matter of months  :D

Ok .. am I the only one who fails completely to see how this is such a big deal?

Please someone educate me.

Not an expert myself but if any one entity has more than 50.000001% control of the Bitcoin network then it would be possible to compromise the entire system by making double spends that are 'verified' by the Bitcoin network. I suppose in essence, they would have a Bitcoin printing press.

It isn't, but you can't control mass hysteria (stupidity). It's like the malleability issue, everyone was completely hysteric about it when MtGox reported about it. Transaction malleability is still there but now you hear nobody about it (and it still isn't a big deal), this is just how mass psychology works. In a month from now Ghash will be back to 35-40% and everyone will be happy again, even though there is really no significant difference between a pool owning 51% of the hashrate or 30%.

I think that the 51% pool would have to do malicious things (that can only affect future blocks, not past blocks). Then everyone in the network would see these attacks. Other pools could join together to own a larger portion to counter(or the big 51% pools miners could go to another pool).

If they do malicious things and double spend, cant people just put like a red flag on bitcoin usage so everyone else knows that bitcoin is not safe until the issue is resolved.

What I think is that if there is a problem, it is very likely that it can be resolved one way or another.
And I do not think ghash has any malicious intent (they just want to get the probability of hitting more blocks in a row to make more $$)

I will put my hands up and admit that I don't understand Bitcoin from a technical standpoint at all. But should any events occur where 'people just have to put up a red flag on Bitcoin usage because it is unsafe', then Bitcoin is finished.

I got that info from watching one of andreas youtube vids where someone asked him about the 51% ghash (in jan). He basically said the community would react to counter the attack. Yea the red flag thing I mentioned might not work (exactly like that).

This is true, ghash would likely never attempt a 51% attack.

The good news is that it does not matter as bitfury is moving several PH/s of capacity out of ghash

Again, it's not the question of would Ghash do it or not...
The point is, it's possible and people can get greedy. Plus, agencies and governments.

Agreed. Not a concern for now, but it s a long term problem that need to be deal with if bitcoin want to stay.

no you are not the only one but there are a few who also think its not a major problem as so far as I know no one has yet lost a coin even on a double spend. however the potential is there to control the block chain by a political or financial organisation and this undermines a core principal of btc that must not be allowed to happen. I believe the majority of bitcoiners are very concerned that there seems no involvement by the core developers to prevent this possibility? so as i posted previously I remain concerned.

These guys are making nice money from their pool.  :D

Merging pools to counter GHash would not be a good thing... it kinda goes against the decentralization thing bitcoin has going for it  ;)

It is acknowledged to be a weakness of Bitcoin. It would be very difficult to "force" an entity not to commit a 51% attack nor to control a majority of the hashrate

i don't see where greedy and destroying your own income comes together. I've heard it over and over. ghash aka people who are getting rich on bitcoin, will intentionally destroy bitcoin. because greed. what i never hear is how that conclusion was reached. where does greed involve you killing your income? i would define greed as a drive to keep your income going at all cost.

Guy works for a company, embezzles a large sum, flees the country, company collapses.

Guy works for a company, gets paid a nice sum by competitor to sabotage it.

Guy manages the finances of a company,  "borrows" a large sum from its bank accont to invest in some rich-quick venture, venture fails, company goes bankrupt.

Guy owns a company, decides to use cheap unsafe components in his product to increase profits, clients get harmed and sue the company for damages, company goes bankrupt.

Guy manages a company, fire the highest-pay employees to increase profits, hires inexperienced workers who cause huge accident. 

And so on.  You can easily find uncoutable examples in the media of people killing their golden-egg goose out of greed.

While I still don't see what makes Ghash.io such an amazing pool, I don't think just combining existing pools is going to do the trick.  Usually when two second run businesses combine you get just a bigger second run business.  The other pools are clearly missing some key feature, hash trading?, that Ghash.io offers.

I agree this is worrisome, not so much from the 51% attack, which is in no way armageddon, but from the fact that a pool can appear that is so much better than all the others and can't be imitated or excelled by the community.

If one pool has 51% of the hash rate, it will still have 51% of the hash rate even if all the other pools are merged together.  ;)

A pool can only mount a "majority attack" if it can control the transactions that are included in the blocks that its miners work on.  Is that necessarily the case?  If each miner in the pool was free to get the block's transactions (except the generation one) from any other node, then the malicious pool owners would need to obtain the complicity of enough miners to make 51% of the hash rate.  Is it possible to force pools to leave that freedom to their miners?

On the other hand, if the two largest pools each have 26% of the hash rate, they could still conspire to mount a 52% attack.