Bitcoin Forum

See here:

https://blockchain.info/pools

ghash.io had nearly 51% few months ago. Now at 11%. How did they go down?

1. china's rule concerning bitcoin (more precisely lack of rule) this year to not be soo hard on bitcoin allowed china to expand its mining farms
2. the prize percentages for miners shares is better on discus
3. alot of people are seeing that GHASH.io rig renting (cloud mining) is expensive
4. china has 1.3billion population. america/eurupe combined is not even half that. so even if 0.002% of world population is into bitcoin.. the scales are more in favour of china.

5. think up several other theories, that have some small form of possibilities.. then add them p to form a theory that not one single cause is to blame, but a combination
6. speculate further....

I wonder how long until >51% of hash is in China    ???

Pretty damn close right now.... ~46% for certain, and 20% "unknown".

guojin mintui.

Seems like China is really becoming the 800lb gorilla in the Bitcoin equation, from build to run to store.

What would be the benefit, if any, to China to potentially control/manipulate the Bitcoin economy as it moves forward?

Hmmm....

Many people speak of China as if it's one person. Although that may be true in some respects, it's not the case for Bitcoin mining.
There are thousands of miners in China. Each one operates independently not controlled by one person or one organization.
If someone were to say, "What would happen if USA has > 51% of hash?"  People would say, "So what?" There are thousands of independent miners in the USA. 51% in one region or one country doesn't mean anything at all.

As for ghash.io, maintenance fees have gone way over profit returns. People are losing money every single day at ghash.io. Wouldn't you turn off your cloud mining rigs if you were losing money every day? The remaining ones are probably not customer-owned.

That question would probably be decided how far does bitcoin reach. THey could have a control over a lot of things.

So, you believe that the Chinese Government has no interest in Bitcoin mining?  I certainly have no proof either way, but my experience with China and her policies might make me question such a belief.  I don't think one can compare the USA to China with respect to direct governmental influence on individuals (but that is easily debated :-) );  also, I really don't know enough about the mathematics of pools to understand if multiple pools could be somehow combined or manipulated in a way that might subtly influence the Bitcoin market.  It was just a thought.

Thanks for your comments, as a newbie I appreciate them!

There have been many corporate miners that have been brought online that are solo mining, as well as (few) cloud mining companies that have actual hashpower that are mining to their own pool.

We have also seen a few new pools pop up that are 'sponsored' by the manufacturers of miners (for example the ant pool)

I think it is because of lots of new mining farms coming into play. Antminer making their pool, and also new pools popping up with people moving away from ghash.io.

I guess that 51% thing with ghash.io worked itself out exactly the way Bitcoin was designed to do. 
That is a huge difference between 51% and 10% in terms of total network hash power.

on the other hand that unknow is getting bigger, it was at 20% before

Ghash.io was very popular in 2014 especialy in the 1st half of the year. There were no, or very low fees and lot of people jump into theit cloud hashing.

Now it`s clear that these times are over. This is the same over and over.

As for example Bitmain and others are openning their farms more powerfull ASIC miners are working for them.

Who can compete with Bitmain, they have latest technology and they start to use it at early stage. Other needs to wait.

The simplest explanation... GHash is/was using first gen Bitfury miners and apparently they didn't reinvest profits into more efficient gear and continue to grow. I don't think they've shrunk. They just didn't grow with the network.

A lot of people were using cex which mined on gash. I'm guessing not that many people use cex anymore. Could that explain a chunk of it?

That doesn't make sense... people aren't renting CEX rigs so they took them offline? CEX would just use the unrented rigs to mine for themselves.

that's very true. Guess cex don't necessarily have to point their rigs at ghash, but i guess that's the most likely.