Bitcoin Forum

Official announcement from Ghash.IO

Rapid growth of GHash.IO mining pool, seen over the past few months, has been driven by our determination to offer innovative solutions within the Bitcoin ecosystem combined with significant investment in resource.

Full:  http://www.pressat.co.uk/releases/ghashio-is-open-for-discussion-93ee9eeb66b80e94bbe31705d451780e/ (http://www.pressat.co.uk/releases/ghashio-is-open-for-discussion-93ee9eeb66b80e94bbe31705d451780e/)

This is very convincing for me:


Leave them alone. They are the biggest mining pool out there, and they have played their part in supporting Bitcoin (through relaying transactions). No need for any bad blood.

You ironic, right? That's only words.

Even if we can trust them, we are not supposed to have to make that choice.
The issue is not resolved...

Totally agreed - crypto is great because it is trustless.

We do not want to have to trust any third party.

Well a temporary solution would be just that, temporary. It would be simply kicking the problem down the road to be dealt with later.

Any solution would likely hurt them in some way, regardless if it is temporary or a long term solution and they likely do not wish to pay for multiple temporary "solutions"

Ghash is just a business. even with over 51% of hash, they are showing no intent to change code to perform any attack. which is good. but if anything protocol wise that needs to change i am certain that a pool owner would not shoot themselves in the foot by implementing themselves.

that includes mischievous code, or code to dilute their customer base, and as such any code to keep the customer base below 51% of any business should be done at the bitcoin-core level and not at the business level.

due to the fact that if GHASH implemented a customer dilution practice, and discus/eligius didnt. it would be unfair on GHASH and would just cause another 51% drama event with a different pool. thus it would have to be an 'all or nothing rule' covering all pools

... so would you want bitcoin-core to have a rule that stops any IP from having more then 10% of network hash, thus giving all pools a fair chance/slice of the pie. or to blame individual pools for being greedy by not turning customers away, or to continue as we are and every few months cry like babies when different pools reach 51% worrying about if they will shoot themselves in the foot.

in short if you dont want another 51% drama event, speak to the bitcoin-core dev team, as there is no point pointing fingers at the pools

Come on dude, get serious. Even a 5 year old kid understands "stranger danger".

http://hagiographic.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/stranger-danger-coloring-pages-print-image-search-results-155874.jpg

I hope they are being sincere and honest.  However it appears they have attacked a bitcoin casino in the past:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=327767.0

So they are not Snow White.

i say assume the worst
if they are not creating havoc yet its because the incentive is not big enought for them to do it
but once the incentive is big enough there to do it (ie govt pays them 1 billion (usd) to fuck around with bitcoin or get imprisoned) then they may do it
for the govt 1 billion (usd) is like 1 good hard days worth of printing, or a secretary entering 1 with a couple zeros behind it (10 seconds of work)

everyone who mines there already knows this or they wouldn't be mining there.

I'm over at Eligius but have considered switching to Ghash...

not sure if you are being sarcastic or whether you are serious, but..

https://i.imgur.com/MvCQ72S.png

Having to trust GHash is completely beyond the point. What if they were perfectly altruistic, but someone held a gun to the operators' heads IRL while performing an attack? Removing the need for trust has the added benefit of removing responsibility to protect against wrong-doers.

good point its the same as the scenario of a pool that had 30% and another pool having 21%. some well organised guy can easily arrange to raid/bribe the 2 pools and get them to implement the same code. meaning a total of 51% of miners would be relaying new confirmed blocks that have nasty rules added.

the only solution would be a 10% cap that is put into the main protocol, that way pool owners have no choice, but to only get a 10% customer base/chance of solving a block and would require 6 pools to be collaborating/co-erst into doing nasty mining rule changes

How would you enforce such a cap? Couldn't a pool operator simply broadcast found blocks to different nodes and/or have the found coins sent to different BTC addresses when blocks are found?

What GHash.IO wrote and posted to Reddit was accurate: any solution that hinders innovation or punishes success is not a real solution.  Their proposal to start an open dialog was appropriate.  

The most up-voted comment on Reddit was luke-jr's statement:


Diplomacy will become increasingly important as the value of the network grows.  It doesn't matter whether talks were going on before this time or not.  The point is that they wants to start talks now.  But this is also what the community wants so just take them up on their offer in a respectful way:

"As a member of the bitcoin mining community, I was pleased to learn of GHash.IO's proposal to hold a ‘round table’ meeting of the key players in the mining industry.  Through open dialogue and our common interest in protecting the network, we're confident that real progress towards solutions that foster innovation while promoting decentralization can be made."

I don't think Bitcoin should pander to monopolists.

The 51% threat MUST remain in place as an important cornerstone of it's decentralised nature. GHash.io need to realise that if they want to grow then they picked the wrong industry sector.

What needs to be done here is exactly NOTHING.

This whole scenario needs to be allowed to play itself out so that mining pools naturally start to dissipate due to lack of incentive caused by the glass ceiling on growth. No technical modification is needed to address the 51% problem because the solution is already built into the Bitcoin economy and Peter Todd has already demonstrated that.

Again, GHash.io need to realise that this is not a sector that businesses can "grow" past a certain size because once they approach the 51% mining monopoly, the Bitcoin economy will start to devalue in its entirety causing them to be stuck in a catch 22 situation.

People don't seem to have thought this through. What would a technical solution do ?

[1] - it would remove the economic inhibitor to mining pool growth

[2] - give the green light to mining pools that wanted to grow past the 51% level

How is this possibly in the interests of Bitcoin users ? The answer is it isn't. It's purely in the interests of mining pool businesses.

Leave things exactly as they are.

It will be a problem for a while and then it will never return again as pools realise that this is an industry sector with anti-monopoly mechanisms already built in and their ambitions for growth won't be pandered to.

I for one am more than prepared to allow the price to sink for a while to allow this these mechanisms to play themselves out.

Am I the only one who thinks we should actually try a 51% attack on Bitcoin and see if it actually works? This will finally dispel the stupid myth or find a fix for it if it turns out to be real, it's not a good idea to leave a big problem unchecked. To be frank though, a lot of this reminds me of the whole black hole scare where people who knew nothing about science were running around in a panic about what some idiot teacher in a high school came up with and of course in the end, nothing happened.

you know, when i have to explain what bitcoin is to someone, i'm not going to say it's decentralized.. because that's the wrong description. it just shifts the balance from the bureaucratic federal reserve to.. mining pools. there's still someone somewhere with the ability and power to call the shots or affect the direction of bitcoin.


people would be up in arms if it worked.. bitcoin would crash big time, imo. when whales find out about it, at least, they'll probably considering dumping their coins.

Youre not alone on that one Lethn. I want someone to prove if it can be done once and FOR ALL.
Deb

This is what programming is about, finding problems and solutions to problems, if we don't then the government or central banks really will try to attack Bitcoin and shut it down, despite the initial rage I think long term it would be the most beneficial option.

Anyone who thinks that 51% means nothing can just look at how bitcoin prices reacted when 51% was reached. It crashed $100 in the day that it was at 51%. That calculates at roughly a week of 51% before the value of bitcoin is....?

Other pools care enough about bitcoin to prevent their pool from getting larger than 30%. Clearly Ghash.io has not got bitcoin's interest as their priority. Whatever their interest is, it's not for the good of the community.

And why does a pool need to be that big?

The press release is weak. "We won't pull the trigger, even if we have the gun to your head." "Please don't be mean to us, we are just trying to be nice."

My short answer is "stay away from 50% ghash".

The long answer is that, if a 50% solution was implemented, you (or someone else) would become the biggest pool by far, which is undesirable. The very risk that this might happen, warrants that no solution to 50% is found.

Way to go Satoshi Nakamoto!!!!! :)

This has happened before and the pool stopped accepting new miners to avoid reaching to 51% mining power.

Doing a 51% attack will only hurt them as there will be no more trust in BTC network, BTC will bite the dust and they will lose their only income.

Precisely!!!

I think that's security enough!!!

+1 this needs a dev solution and I am optimistic that one can found if there is the cooperation at the conference needed. However may I remind everyone that the banksters have controlled the fiat system for 150 years. They own all politicians in all countries. Thinking the bitcoin community marketing personal and fledgling mining pools can prevent a take over of btc is extremely naive (in my opinion) and it must not happen.  We need to do something whilst we can.

^^^ This

The only drama affects ghash (or any other 50%er) and nobody else. You saw the market reaction. Let ghash punch themselves in the face!!!!

How short sighted people can be? Everyone is talking about ghash....ghash this, ghash that. It's not ghash fault! They are doing their business, and doing it really good! If you want to blame anyone, than blame bitcoin protocol or, even better, people that maintain it and refuse to change it so 51% attack is prevented.

It's like noone knows that 51% situation already happened before ghash. And still, people that have power to fix it, are not doing anything.

So on one side we have pool that does it's job and on other side we have people who have power to fix problem at the source. Who should we blame....i know...let's blame pool. How dare they doing their job THAT good?!
(I'm selling pitchforks and torches if anyone is interested...0.001 per torch, 0.005 per pitchfork)

If the 50% non-problem is fixed, another, real one will occur! What do we do if ghash (or anyone else) does such a good job that they reach eg 80%?
I think it's better to not fix the non-problem.

A malicious entity committed to 51%-attacking the network would simply use multiple IP addresses.  This proposal would make the situation worse because it would tend to decrease transparency.  

Here are the best suggestions I've heard:

1.  Soft-fork the format of the blockheaders so that "hashers" can determine using only an SPV client if they are working on an attack chain.  The purpose of this is to increase transparency so that hashers can see more clearly how their hashpower is being deployed.  

2.  Promote P2Pool to attract additional hashpower and reduce reward variance.  Make the process of setting up a bitcoin node and connecting to P2Pool simple and write clear tutorials on the process.

3.  Work towards commoditization of SHA256 ASIC chips.  Right now, the significant obstacle to setting up million dollar + mining operations is securing a reasonable price for hardware.  If we could further decouple hardware producers from the SHA256 ASIC technology, it would create a more competitive market allowing many new large mining operations to come online.  These large operations will be incentivized to solo mine or use P2Pool to retain control of their hashpower.

4.  Educate the community: understand that a 51% attacker cannot create coins, spend coins that aren't his, change network rules, or much of anything really.  All they can do is double-spend their own coins (but it will be obvious in hindsight), and prevent transactions from confirming (this too will be obvious as well as likely stoppable using the Gavin-technique).  

  

This was posted on reddit too rigth? Receiver alot of hate there.

+++++1!

1. GHash grows to 51%, watches price drop...
2. GHash shrinks back below 50%
3. New great and wonderful pool is created that everyone flocks towards, shrinking GHash further down to 30%
5. New pool grows to 30%
6. GHash and new pool are owned by same interests
7. BTC price is great, sheeple are content

if you get a lot of hate you are probably close to the main points of interest- this was a good attempt to outline some possible solutions and I liked it. However although sometimes doing nothing avoiding (the law of unintended consequences) is good I do not think so in this case,. Already a lot of smaller miners cannot keep up with equipment costs to get an roi because of the hash rate. so if all the btc go to one entity ( open source includes banks and government) then one entity will hold all the btc produced in the next 20 years about 9 million. That is a breach of the covenant unwritten and disputed but I think implicit that every individual has a right to autonomy over their own finances, political or religious interests. If one entity or cabal controls btc we are back to something similar to what exists now. I think it must not be allowed to happen. 

You all don't really think Ghash is below 50% overnight, do you? What is the total of Ghash + unknown?

https://blockchain.info/pools

I do appreciate them going out of their way to make the pie chart less scary again though?

The market is to be appreciated for that, not ghash.

Unfortunately you are correct. Ghash is very customer focused. Most other pools are run by people who are more technical focused, who understand the mining process well but have trouble with the advertising/marketing side of things.

Or the other pools just don't want to work for free. The only marketing that has ever worked well in bitcoin mining is having a lower price than the other pools. What you should be asking yourself is why ghash.io wants every miner to mine for them so badly that they are willing work for free right now. I can see several reasons, but not a single one that's good for Bitcoin and it's users.

eligius has a 0% fee and other pools have very low fees as well. What they are missing are their fancy stats pages that updates in real time