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https://blockchain.info/pools

did btcguild users jumped over to ghash?

or did ghash keep buying machines?

Can't imagine what is going to happen if they keep increasing their hashing power at this rate......

Okay, it's time to discourage blocks made by ghash.io before they have 51%.

It this gets any worse, I'm going to have to create a proof-of-stake hard fork of Bitcoin...

What is incentivizing miners to keep joining GHash? Are they getting *that* much marginal utility from GHash over any other pool?

This is a big, big problem. Even if GHash is benevolent, it still exposes a weak point for someone trying to attack bitcoin (only need to coerce two people to have 51% right now).

Dont know if CEX.IO plays a part in that cause all there GHS points to ghash

If you look at the 24 hour chart they are at 41%.

Ghash combined with "unknown" is well over 51%.

OK, they just got 42%

I just changed my title to reflect the urgency...

It looks like a comet crashing on earth.

I'll buy your bitcoins $0.80 on the dollar!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOzMdEwYmDU

Bitcoin survived when Deepbit did it:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=26656

So? It will always keep surviving potential 51% attacks, until one time it doesn't. Also that thread is from 2011, and has no useful information about what the resolution was.

Right now GHash has no incentive to attack the network. But that's not the point - the point is that if someone wants to attack bitcoin, they need to coerce only 2 people.

The community needs to take SOME preemptive action. Right now everyone is plugging their ears and saying "don't worry this problem will go away on its own".

The resolution was more mining on other pools.

If you're worried about ghash.io having too much power then buy an ASIC and either solo mine or join a different pool.

There is no such thing as "preemptive action" in a system designed to have no central authorities where 1 hash=1 vote.

If I had a botnet I could DDoS Ghash
If I had 10,000 btc I could subsidize small pools
If I was skilled as fuck I could make a cloud p2pool mining service with better marketing than ghash

Let me guess, "By 'no such thing' I really meant 'no reasonable thing', here's why all those are not feasible"

It's because GHash does merged mining with NMC, DEV and IXC.

Has ghash owner shown any communication or willingness to stop adding hash before he gets to even close to 51 percent?  I've seen that done in the past on some of the alts.

Personally that's one of the reasons I prefer it, but also that I can trade GHS along the side for some profit (which I'm inclined to say seems all pure luck and speculation) and it has a rather nice interface. Honestly, I'd doubt we're likely to have Ghash.io get over 50% and even if we do I don't think the consequences are going to be as massive as OP is predicting.

You're assuming the operator of GHash would be acting as a rational profit-maximizing agent, and not as someone being coerced by someone who just wants to destroy BTC. Having half the hashing power makes you the weapon, not the bad guy.

"Going away from ghash.io" ? What if ghash (cex.io) owns all the machines? They still mine even if you go away. The big jump in hashing power might be a massive purchase from somewhere. unless someone can confirm this is false.

"A profit-seeking person will always gain more by just following the rules". What if its not for profit reason? How can we guarantee that they are sane?

Despite all the arguments about not worrying about 51% attack, think about all the time and money you invested in this, can you seriously sleep in peace, knowing that ghash has 51% power?

Do you seriously think the public don't care what ghash can do with 51% on their hands?

what if the lost of confidence in bitcoin is not temporary?

"if this attack is successfully executed, it will be difficult or impossible to "untangle" the mess created - any changes the attacker makes might become permanent." - Are you really taking these words lightly?

This is actually a really big threat to the security of bitcoin as a whole. The whole setup is supposed to solve the whole trust issue, but if 51% control is achieved and maintained, I don't see any alternative to jumping aboard another coin, probably POS. Saying fingers crossed is not enough.

I was thinking of trying Ghash.io because of its merged mining, but after reading this, I'll probably stick to eligus. We are having horrible luck lately though, and BTCGuild is losing the PPLNS race to Ghash.io, so your best option may be to PPS on BTCGuild, and thats with a 7.5% fee...

In the meantime, I'm going to look at the cost of datacenters, maybe having multiple Cex.io's isn't a bad idea

Is ghash.io's hashing power primarily from independent miners pointing at them, or from their own in-house mining (cex.io, etc)?

Does anyone know who the two big bitcoin mines, one in Iceland and the other in Hong Kong, mine for?  Are they owned by one of the major pools, or are they solo miners that have nothing to do with the big names in pooled-mining?

Just posted the warning here: http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/2014/01/09/warning-ghash-io-nearing-51-leave-pool/

Admit it guys, you all want to see what would happen if a pool reaches >=51%. I sure do, maybe they will have a change a heart and maybe...surprise, they wouldn't do anything.

No, I don't want to see that.

Is this a time to jump into fiat?

Indeed, the pie chart is based on the actual solved blocks and not the physical hash rate.  Given the random nature of solving a block, we expect normal statistical variation to make certain pools appear stronger than they really are for a while, and other pools appear weaker.

Nevertheless, I think we'd all prefer to see no pool with more than 25% of that pie.  

As we know, ghash.io has their own hardware, which they are leasing through cex.io, and then also there are "external" miners who joined their pool. Do we know which percentage are the external miners?

Another question is, why other pools also don't do merged mining to incentivize more miners?

There is not only the issue of a possible 51% attack.

Remember that Bitcoin Hardforked in the Beginning of 2013? This issue was resolved very quickly (I didn't even notice it happened) thanks to pool owners that worked together with the developers very well.

The Question is would this work out as well, if such an event would happen now? Would ghash.io owners even care? Do they even communicate with the devs?

But on the basis, let's just see. Bitcoin is an experiment if an entirely unregulated decentralized system can work. If Bitcoiners are willing to sacrifice the security of the system for minimal provit, than the answer to that experiment is simply: No.

I think most of us agree that miners controlling >50% are not incentivized to double spend or otherwise hurt the network: they would be hurting the value of their holdings and their reputation as a mining pool.  If GHash gets 51% for a week, it will very likely be a non-issue.  

But do you not also agree that it would be preferable to have smaller pools?  This would make those improbable "attacks" even less probable.  

Perhaps by having this discussion, someone thinking about joining GHash "because of merged mining" would join Eligius instead.  

Maybe this is an opportunity to justify a hard fork with anonymity built into the core protocol as well as the solution to this issue, such as Proof of Stake mining or requiring every other block to be mined with Scrypt?  

Well, clearly it can work.  It's working now, maybe not perfectly, but pretty damn good.  Worst case scenario we slightly modify the system and try again, or jump to an another pre-existing system (peercoin perhaps).

We need more pools which offer 0% fee.

I'd like to know the answer to these two questions as well.

I would not be worried about an honest pool breaking 50% for a short period of time but there is evidence that ghash.io is not an honest pool.


Double-spending for example:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=327767.0

Yes! In fact, it's time for PANIC SELLING!

http://s13.postimg.org/e0wkewn1f/facepalm.png

This is the reason everyone should be using p2pool.

Ahhh PeerCoin pos....

I agree it's better when no-pool is so massive and p2pool should be used anyone.

Having said this, we have had this problem before for an extended period and Deepbit didn't take at advantage of it. Also 51% (so just 1% more than 50%) only gives very limited double spending options unless you're willing to work at it for a very long time. Finally everyone in the entire world will know you've done this destroying any an all fate in you and instantly devaluing Bitcoin (the thing you gain by double spending in the first place).

This is not the apocalypse.

If you are a bitcoin lover and believe in its philosophy, you wouldn't want to risk it. I see the consequences much more severe than what most people might think.

The problem is that ghash.io is too big compared to the rest of the network, not that the 55% of the network which isn't ghash.io isn't running the right mining software.

I like p2pool too, but it's not a magic bullet.

A long time ago when I last mined I used p2pool. I cannot control what other people do. Still, there is really now reason whatsoever to panic.

In my opinion something like p2pool has to be integrated inside the official bitcoin client in order to avoid situations like these.

About GHASH.IO/CEX.IO anyway, I am not sure they will be wise enough not to do anything in order to avoid screwing up the system, did you forget about this?

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

Yes, I agree, but what happens if a malicious person hacks in and take control of the hash power?

Having so much hash power in one centralised place is an extremely bad idea in every situation.

Gotta say things look pretty rosy from inside of cexio at the moment blockwise, but i've always upheld that if they near 51% I'll repoint my miners to the guild. Having said that, whenever ghashio has been down / unmineable and I've had my miners elsewhere, the difference in earn is laaaaarge.

Since they command gazillions of $ worth of hashing power now, there's no incentive to double-spend and massive incentive to ensure a rogue employee can't do it from within since they've had that problem before. They don't want all that coin they're making massively devalued by a huge doublespend, and I'm sure even now they're being battered with support requests asking what their plans are at 51%.

Plus if it came to it and people started bailing, it wouldn't be hard for them to split the pool into one for hosted cex hashing, one for mining devices, or just slap a fee on there for hardware miners and watch a bunch jump ship.

Also, it's dropping: 40% now.

Small changes in hash rate from day to day are mostly due to pool luck. For example, BTCGuild has had below average luck for the past 24 hours.

I am concerned that gnash.io controls so much of the network, but take small percentage changes in hashrate from day to day with a grain of salt because they change with pool luck.

So, NSA hash plus Ghash = 51% and end of Bitcoin? Or NSA control over Bitcoin?





Jeez, just kidding. Don't worry about it. Uncle Sam will make it all alright again... wait what?  :o






-----

Hahahahaha :D

I check the hashrate of ghash is 4.59P and btcguild is 3.297P,which quotient is 1.39,but the quotient blockchain shows is 1.72 at the same time.

Right, and BTCGuild pool luck has only been ~80% over the past 24 hours.

Approximate Pool Luck* (24H / 3D / 1W / 2W / 1M): 80.866% / 92.269% / 100.870% / 103.326% / 103.741%

BTC = risk
51% = risk
ghashio nearing 51% = risk
any pool nearing 51% = risk
any pool making use of 51% to attack = risk
any pool that makes use of 51% to attack the network significantly and is noticed in any way = massive abandonment of pool
any pool nearing 51% = smaller-scale abandonment of pool
ghashio attacking the network with hosted hashes and miner workers = massive abandonment of pool and/or hosted GHS sold
ghashio attacking the network with hosted hashes alone = implausible + hosted GHS sold + cex/ghash left userless
ghashio business model gains by doing so = null
rogue hacker/employee gains by doing so = minimal compared to being a BTC early adopter like the rest of us on the inside of cex/ghash.

Caution is good, but why would anybody on the inside of cex/ghash be somehow amazingly disgruntled with BTC enough to attack it, yet sufficently talented at manual blockchain manipulation and other facets of bitcoin to be a real big earner in BTC terms?

Likewise, a hacker breaking into cex/ghash might be able do it. but rly, if you hacked your way onto the inside of that, wouldn't it be in your better interests to steal some BTC rather than break the BTC network as a whole?

Also be aware, all, that it's entirely possible to perform a lot of the facets of a 51% attack with less hashing power. If you fear ghashio might do something nuts with their hashpower or be too vulnerable for the responsibility, then how about this: they've had the power to make these attacks for weeks already, just at a lower success rate.

And hey, if'n you distrust most of your blocks being baked in one place or by one group, then what about the genesis block and friends?

the biggest incentive (I see) for using CEX.io/Ghash.io is one major thing, a lot of pool owners have said no to...

auto-payouts with splits by percentage

Which makes it tons easier when I have a friend that wants to throw some money down on a miner and have me toss in the rest + host it, then I just have to put in an address and what % he gets, what % I get... and nothing else. No more screwing around with spreadsheets, no more bullshit.

Awhile back I asked several 'group buy leaders' in PM how they did the split %'s on shares in miners, the answer I always got back was 'spreadsheet'. Seriously, a spreadsheet... I was debating on making something to handle the splitting for myself in PHP or some other language, however CEX.io/Ghash.io came along, 0% pool fee, splits everything easily, bam, sold.

Not to mention when people ask me why I use it, I tell them that and... then they start using it for the same reason. Obviously a feature a lot of people overlooked, plus merged mining in IXC, DVC, NMC is also a damn good perk.

We need to encourage BTCGuild to turn on 0% fees for a while, that will encourage people away from ghash.io

Time to start lobbying BTCGuild - they have shown a keen interest in doing things to preserve the well being of the network.

If they wanted to take over Bitcoin they wouldn't wait till 51% when everyone would be watching. They would have a "shadow" farm ready to do the attack while people are still debating what to do when they're getting close to 51 (so, right about NOW). Anyway, I never got it. Why would people put millions in bitcoin without researching. without taking every negative aspect into account, including the 51% issue. And, by the way, you don't really need 51% to launch limited attacks. They can do some stuff already. Also, 51% doesn't guarantee complete control either. I hope everyone realises the massive shortcomings of Bitcoin and some altcoin takes its place.

Precisely why at least ten very large shared cexio accounts i know of won't be going anywhere else anytime soon.

All we need is a pool with four coin mergemining, low/null fee and % payout splits.
the only one with all those just happens to be connected to a massive chunk of scary static hashpower.

Looks like the community is responding - the hash power has dropped already to 39% https://blockchain.info/pools?timespan=24hrs

Do we really want our network - currently worth over $10,000,000,000 of people's money - to be protected only by the whim/integrity of one person/organisation?

They may not have an incentive to kill the goose, but they are human and they are fallible.  

How well do we know them to trust them with this much money?

Think about it.

so now we are protected only by whim/integrity of two persons/organisations.

 Knock out the current top two, and then we'll be then again protected only by whim/integrity of the next two largest pools (And this is nothing against BTCG. Eleuthria really does seem like a super dude and I really appreciate him)

 Difficult problem to solve  :-\

gavin should do a patch sooner rather than later.

What could he do?

other pools can lower their rates...

otherwise BGuild etc.. will follow the Deepbit route.

But I think pool operators only care about their % and not about the network.

I know I'm jumping in on this halfway and I'm going to get caught up ASAP, but all morning I've been wondering the same thing... What have the OTHER pools been doing to make it more attractive for miners to leave GHash.io? Why are all the efforts focused on getting people to leave?

eligius has 0% fees, a simple structure, NMC merged mining, and also shared the tx fees. I moved 600Gh there already

If these arse-holes had a fucking brain they would self limited their hashing power to a sensible number like 35-40% of the network to ensure we don't have a problem like today as they creep onto 50%.

People are buying up mining shares on cex.io for above their NPV because they expect to profit from selling them to a greater fool later.

That situation doesn't exactly create the best set of incentives for good pool behaviour.

Don't forget GBT, so even with 51% they couldn't attack the network.

Although the raspi on my bitfury can't seem to handle it :(

IMO any single entity controlling > 1% is a concern.

pool i use - triplemining is giving part of the fees back in jackpot, so it has some attractivity. But problem is the overall hashrate is not too big and it creates wicked circle, because with rising difficulty people migrate to large pools, just because they find blocks much faster.
 -and it can take days with smaller pools to get block

Thats why you get some big pools approaching 50% time to time. I don't think its much about fees, but more likely the reward waiting time.

I think it is the latter

They released a statement here: https://ghash.io/ghashio_press_release.pdf

I wouldn't believe anything they say. Obviously they won't attack the network and devalue bitcoin but they still want to have majority hashing power. They are pretty much congratulating themselves in that letter and they won't introduce trading fees like BTC Guild did to make miners move to other pools.

Just look at their fucking logo... they look and sound like a typical villain corporation

independent mining facilities are people who with their mining gear connect to ghash pool or?

If they do indeed start allowing CEX.IO users to choose their own pool that will greatly improve the situation.

0% fees will destroy competition and they can afford to do it because they are getting revenue from other sources, this cannot be said about the other pools. BTCGuild makes a little selling ASICMiner Block Eruptors but basically, 0% fees are the death of competition because the majority of miners are not altruistic, they are doing it for the money.

Unless they're in a time warp, they don't.

Eligius has 0% fees, and PPS. Switch now, and USE GBT!

Much money can made on both upside and downside.
Even more when you know ahead of time which way it will go and why.

Giving such control to anyone is not good for everyone, that is why some are not so happy about central banking.
If folks wanted to have such control in the hands of so few, they should use dollars.  

Unless this is resolved in a better way, it removes much of the value of project bitcoin.

Though they will still control the ability to choose, and the visibility and implementation of the choice.
The even more encouraging element was the "no new miners in our pool" elements.

no registrations any more or no solo miners who connect to pool?

is the 45% bitfury just thier own private mining facility (which is bitfury based) or does it also include all the pool members with bitfury systems (which is what im hoping)

Im not sure how they would determine this though, besides looking at worker names (ie: username.Bitfury1 vs username.Avalon1 vs username.mydamnfineminingrig)

It's their private mining capacity.  It makes sense given their rise in hash rate compared to the overall network growth.  I had estimated last night in IRC that their private farm was in the 2 PH/s range since new mining capacity historically gets spread proportionally among pools (a pool with 20% network share gets ~20% of the hash rate from a company shipping a batch of miners), yet GHash.io's rate of growth was nearly double that of the rest of the network, which would mean ~50% of their hash rate was coming from their private farm.

If cex.io users can "choose their own pool", then ghash.io may drop to, say, 20% of the hashing power.  Leaving them *actually in control* of more than 51%... but with no clear way to track it.

Couldn't a malicious cex.io employee execute a 51% attack by:

  - switching everyone over to "bad pool X"
  - double spending like crazy to line some wallets
  - confirming it
  - switching everyone back

Agreed.  Any currency which relies on well-behaved market participants is doomed.  The protocol must enforce good behavior.

GBT in itself as it's currently implemented and used gives you precisely zero protection.

Please explain? ???

Mining on a pool via the GBT protocol (and virtually everyone mines on stratum) only means that your mining software gets the summary of all the transactions that are included when you're mining. This is also why stratum was more popular because it uses a lot less bandwidth. However, as a miner, are you personally monitoring all those transactions and watching exactly what they're doing and making sure they're not doing a 51% attack? Do you have the tools and know how to investigate them in real time? Also if you're not actually mining on ghash.io then you're not even looking at what transactions they're including.

For it to protect you, you'd have to be mining there with the gbt protocol and investigate the transactions in real time, notice the transaction differences from what's going on in the bitcoin network at large, and then somehow inform the world that it was going on and then manage to convince the other 5PH of miners to stop mining there.

For some reason, I thought that the miner itself could pick what transactions to include with a local bitcoind. I've got a pretty good understanding of bitcoin (see code in sig) but the merkle tree generating process still goes completely over my head. The wiki entry says something to that effect.

GBT can be used in that way for solo mining.  Actually, all pools use GBT to build their blocks.  But no pool implementation has been developed that allows miners to pick & choose transactions with GBT, mostly because it would require WAY too much bandwidth since miners would have to submit shares including the transactions used to build their share.

Every TX you include would be 64 bytes of data you have to send to the pool (since current GBT implementation communicates with ASCII, so 32-bytes represented as hex pairs = 64 bytes), plus a little more for markup.  The pool would then have to use a *lot* of extra CPU power to identify all those transactions in its own list and build the merkleroot to then validate your share.

If you go further, and allow miners to pick transactions from their local bitcoind, you need to send the entire raw block worth of data to the pool since the pool might not have the raw tx data for the transactions you're picking, preventing it from matching the data with just the transaction hashes.

Call Winklevii and ask them to buy a chunk of miners at ghash.io ;D

I hope large bitcoin holders and investors are looking at security issues of bitcoin. They can do much in improving security of bitcoin and have a very good reason to do so.

I just looked and it seems GHASH is around 31% now, and as a result eligius went from 11% to 17% almost overnight

Maybe ghash is mining for eligius now.

The thought had crossed my mind and in fact the ultimate irony is that if they're mining on eligius with the GBT protocol and choosing their own transactions, then GBT would actually be giving them a way to still perform their 51% attack while using eligius as the unwitting proxy for their actions. A very vigilant pool op would pick this up but it's still an interesting theoretical misuse of the protocol which was lauded for its ability to prevent this.

Of course if they were mining with stratum to another pool they wouldn't be able to do that - only with GBT can the miner do double spends and 51% :P

Nah. They control the equipment, so at any instant they could be using the same hashpower to solo mine it with the same effect. It's absolutely equivalent in terms of ability to double spend an unconfirmed transaction. (And highlights that cex.io having physical control of the hashpower is actually the root concern, not what 'pool' their hashpower was showing up on 12 hours ago).

If you step back and think about it, you'll realize the argument there is somewhat incoherent. Basically you're saying GBT gives the actual miner control of what their hashpower does and so perhaps they could misuse it. But since the hashpower is physically in their hands— they already have that control going forward no matter what.

It's also the case that GBT itself is sort of neutral on the question of miner control, with stratum a pool couldn't implement miners choosing their own transactions, with GBT they could allow it or not (and at the moment, I don't think that any centralized GBT using pools actually allow it: it complicates pooling for the transaction fees). Even not allowing the mutation at least the miner can be aware of what they're being asked to mine, though thats sort of useless without smarter miner software that does something useful with that knoweldge.

All of this ^ plus I will note that currently Eligius does not allow transactions to be changed with GBT.  The goal currently is to provide a method of transparency to those who desire it.

A point of clarification of gmaxwell's post is that even if the pool allowed a miner to mine their own transactions via GBT, the pool itself does not change what other miners on the pool are mining based on what other miners would be trying to mine.  So any miner mining unique transactions (double spends or not) would essentially be trying to solo mine them which has the same effect with or without the pool.  (It was implied but I'm not sure that was clear in the above post.)

-wk

Edit: Side note: I have no knowledge of Ghash.io utilizing Eligius in any way currently.

Lulz - since solo mining has the same problem that's OK for GBT to have the problem?

OK you really need to learn how to argue.
Ah, so you are saying that GBT isn't implemented fully anywhere so all these arguments by you and  your boss Luke-Jr about how GBT is the way to mine now, are crap.
It's slow, network data intensive (compared to stratum) and doesn't provide transaction selection (a so called advantage) with any miners or on any pool anywhere.

Sigh - nothing new.

There isn't a problem with solo mining nor GBT here.
The entity which controls the hardware has control of it period.

You could ask btcguild to set their fees to near 0%   since he puts up fees when its too popular, now might be a good time to do the opposite.

Or any pool could offer to do that, might help some

eligius is 0% fees. BTCGuild is still large enough that going there is not a solution to this problem.

I wish slush's pool would drop fees to 1% or 0% - its a great pool and i would happily hop back over to it if there were no fees

Sure. Pool op's must pay all maintenance, development, support and other costs from own pocket and working for free! Stay away from pools with fee!

http://s8.postimg.org/id1sskr05/375994_sarcasm_sign.jpg (http://postimage.org/)

Half your fees, double your hashpower, same income. With vardiff, server load may not increase that much.

this. At 2% fees i am reluctant to move to slush's pool - thats a LOT of income hes getting for basic server hosting. 0.5% is more then enough IMO

I think the most rational fee system is to have all the bitcoins go to a pot, and the manager of the pool subtracts .1 bitcoins per day and takes 0.5%.

Eligius had something like that originally.
Except it was like 0.000864 BTC per day and 0.00005%...

Comments about pool fees are largely irrelevant as miners will choose to mine on whichever pools they choose for their own particular reasons. Fees are only one consideration to be taken into account. It's up to competing pools to present their case to attract miners based on product or service differentiators and generic comments about "rational fee systems" doesn't address the complexity of the supply or demand side of the market.

I mine on pools which charge a fee and I also mine on pools which are ostensibly free. Price is the not a motivating factor for me, continuity of service, availability of support and other considerations are more important to me than price.

Everyone is different of course, but its worth resisting a thought-bubble of 'one size fits all' as it rarely works, however well-meaning or rational they allegedly appear to their proposers.

who pays the expenses of a zero fee pool, and why? Nothing is free, where is the money coming from? ???

True dat, what is the reason given for a zero fee pool?  What is the owner getting out of it?

A fee-free pool to mine on themselves. ;)

So, the only benefit to the pool owner (vs. solo mining) of having tons of people to answer to (or ignore as the case may be) and opening yourself up to potential DDoS, is reducing your variability?
Does not seem like enough of an incentive to me.

That's the whole purpose of pools in general.

I think in retrospect looking back and reading over this thread it's been rather interesting as at first I was dismissive of the notion that Ghash were approaching 51% as we tended to hear a lot of doom and gloomers say similar things with regard to my main pool BTC Guild last year.

However, on closer examination, there's far more transparency with BTC Guild than there is with Ghash and there's no nagging doubts with any conduct of BTC Guild but there certainly is with Ghash regarding how they 'feed in' the GHS for sale on their cloud site and also why or how running a zero fee pool makes commercial sense as in my opinion they do not operate as a community-driven or not-for-profit pool. Given also the visibility of the pool operator from BTC Guild and their availability to answer any and all questions regarding the pool, in contrast with the rather ham-fisted PR-driven 'support' offered by CEX, there's just not, for me, the same level of transparency or comfort around the visibility or accountability of Ghash as there is with BTC Guild.

This statement below may satisfy some people, but in my opinion, this PR release regarding the 51% issue generates more questions than it answers:

https://ghash.io/ghashio_press_release.pdf

One interesting point on the release is the claim that 55% of their pool is "independent miners", so if a reasonable percentage of those miners were to move their hashing elsewhere, whilst it might not entirely alleviate all concerns, it would go some way to mitigating some of the 51% risk. Previously I had somehow suspected that the 'independent miner' percentage was much lower and that there wasn't a great deal that could be done by the mining community as after all, if one party is growing a mining farm faster than rabbits procreate, the vast majority of miners even if they increase their hashing, aren't going to be able to compete. However, if 55% of the Ghash pool is independent miners, then communications like this thread can go some of the way to inform people and maybe even change where they point their hashing at.

I'm only a small miner but I'm conscious that in the well-worn phrase, "you're either part of the solution or you're part of the problem," I'm not entirely happy doing nothing, especially as I have about 20% of my rig pointed at the Ghash pool and a lesser amount mining via their Bitfury CEX cloud service.

So what I have decided to do, is to support a genuine, non-corporatised, community-driven, transparent pool which I have read and learned more about purely as a result of deliberating the implications of this thread, that is, I'll be shifting my miners from Ghash to Eligius so my only exposure to the Ghash pool will be from my virtual cloud miners on CEX and none of my physical hardware will point to Ghash.

Although I had looked at Eligius before, I hadn't actually examined it in any great detail and I have to say now that I have looked at it far more closely, I'm very pleased to have taken the time to look at it and can now appreciate why it's the third largest pool.

Of course, it's entirely up to each individual independent miner where they mine and how they react to the changing mining landscape, but if you're like me and doing nothing doesn't seem to be the right thing to do, take some time to research other pools as there's some really great looking pools, some with quite interesting features that I thought I'd looked at critically before, but it always pays to take a second look and mitigating against the possible risk of a 51% attack is something that all miners should be conscious of.

For what it's worth, the new breakdown of my pools will be:

BTC Guild                     65%  (no change)
Eligius                         18%   (+18%)
Ghash (via CEX only)     14%   (-18%)
Others                          3%   (no change)

Given that the Bitfury CEX mining component is apparently only 45% of the Ghash pool, I don't perceive any need to completely eliminate that exposure and as far as I know, there's not a similar straightforward cloud service to substitute to.

Anyway, at the beginning of this thread, I didn't really imagine myself changing my opinion or changing pools, but I'd like to thank everyone who has commented on this thread as I think sitting on your hands and doing nothing isn't going to help and I also think that saying to yourself that there isn't any problem undervalues the power that independent miners have to keep the bitcoin network operating efficiently and safely.

Thanks again for all your comments and observations.

:)


   

There is also the fractional coins left in the pool that folks forget about when they move on.
Like change in a wishing well pond.

Do you guys know CEX.io contact address is on Threadneedle Street?

You know what else is on Threadneedle Street, The Bank of England! It came to power as a central bank by buying all the Kings currency out of circulation (royal tally sticks).

Must watch video to educate yourself about the City of London not being London!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc

Even the Queen of England has to get their permission before she can visit that's how powerful they are!

You don't know the power of the dark side!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onhFH7jpq2c

;)

32 Threadneedle just so happens to be the address of a "virtual office" service.

From their website (http://www.beoffices.com/our-products/virtual-offices/virtual-office-locations/london-city/threadneedle-street):


My guess is that the cex.io operator has never so much as set foot on Threadneedle.

As hash power aggregates toward mining pools, the pool owners bear the risk of being coerced. 
The pool owner may be entirely honorable, but may not be able to withstand coercion by TPTB.  Princess Leia watcher her homeworld be obliterated rather than give up the rebel plans. 

Any large pool owner that is not concerned about this, maybe just already has been coerced.

If there is one thing "they" are good at, its the protection racket.  When you own all the guns, jails, courts, and money, you can get away with just about anything.

The ghash.io PR piece does not read to me to be sufficiently concerned with the problem they have created for themselves to keep me from being concerned about them.  I wish them safety, and wish they were more concerned about it themselves.  As it is, they are presenting their pool as being the single largest threat to the existence of bitcoin today. 

I am less worried about ghash.io being the assassin against bitcoin, than them being the gun used by others that just can find where and how to leverage the trigger.  Keep your children safe, team ghash, for all our sake.

A good pool option is triplemining, i created a mini pool you are welcome to joinhttp://MinerosMexico.triplemining.com (http://MinerosMexico.triplemining.com), the good thing here is the weekly jackpot.

I think ghash keep buying machines, they also have their cex.io to sell overpriced GH/s :)

If you follow:

https://blockchain.info/pools?timespan=24hrs

BTC Guild just overtook GHash.IO as the largest pool.

So does bitparking, and has been for ages.

What's the appeal of merge mining coins other than Namecoin which have almost no resale value at all?

it's okay to go over 51% as long as the pool has no bad intentions and uses it to double-spend.  cex.io is making a ton of money.  Why would they chew their own foot off?  Think about it.

If the "unknown" was that high then I would share your concerns.

You are considering only the intent of cex.io (and I agree with that, great folks).  But...
Consider also the intent of those that might be able to exert coercion upon them.

It protects the pool owner to keep a smaller pool as they are less of a target.  No one likes getting a ransom call.

In our fast paced world of social media that would be known about almost instantly and miners would switch away.

It is also pretty easy to exclude an abuser as Gavin once blogged about.

People worry too much.

Dat luck

https://i.imgur.com/bCtDydg.png (http://imgur.com/bCtDydg)

This is something I have been wondering: Does a big pool have an advantage in luck over a smaller one. Reason being I switched about a terrahash from Eliguis to Eclipse and the luck on eclipse has been bad. Right now it's back to back 1 day periods since a block was found.

Does a large pool have a skewed chance of finding the next block over a little pool or an individual with a CPU due to having more local info about the last block generated (ie: they made it)?

If not I'll stick with a smaller pool because variance should even out. If so then I'm being a "chump".

its all about variance. If you took a 2-month sample all pools should be about equal payouts, but the big pools give small rewards very frequently.

you make a good point though, and yes there would be a very slight headstart given to a pool that found a block. Its not much, but it may add 1% to the long-term payout

Perhaps, and perhaps not.  There are quite a few things about which social media is entirely unaware even after years of attempting to discover.
Either way, you have missed the point.
In order to reduce the pool owners security and safety requirements, it is in both our and their best interests not to approach a large percentage.

I mine on Slush, which has about 4% of the total hash. In the last two weeks, the pool has gotten about 5 or 6 blocks on average per day. There are 144 blocks given in a 24 hour period. 144 * .04 = 5.76. Sounds about right to me.

But to verify your variance point. One day we got 11 blocks. Two days after that we got only 2.

They seem to be mining orphans...
Anyone know what's up ?

Orphans to whom? Clearly they don't think they're orphans  ;)

Bwahahahahaha

Ok, I'll think about that a bit more. Hm.

Indeed. Right now I'm in just a suck pile of luck I guess, or it's a self selecting thing (if blocks drop quickly you don't notice but when a block goes long you see it for longer). We're on block 3 of the "this is taking fucking forever" but I'll give it another week before deciding that I wasted a few weeks. Which is a fallacy of course but damn it is seductive thinking.

C

Has anyone checked out DirectPool yet? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=472122.0

I'm giving them a chance because if I am going to come close to ROI on my ants I need as little variance as possible. Ive been on the guild for a year using PPLNS, paying high fees and the moment I go to us PPS they drop it. I'm sure if a lucky streak returns they will re add it since it is profitable for the Admin and Profits are what matters ... business business business

Variance swings both ways, and ends up dead even in the long run.  That's the only reason PPS was kept as long as it was on BTC Guild, when it's been under consideration for removal for the better part of a year.

It may end up even from a "finding blocks" point of view, but doesn't it degrade along with difficulty? IE: If I have bad luck now and good luck later they will balance out in the number of blocks found. However due to difficulty, bad luck now costs me more in absolute bitcoin than later, eventually no amount of luck will make me whole.

Or am I missing something?

You are right, but the reverse is also true. Good luck now rewards you more than the bad luck later will cost you after a diff change. You can't know in advance if you'll have good or bad luck, and the odds of either are the same.

i wish I switched earlier. Im clearing double at ghash. Makes me think something fishy is going on at guild. plus ghash has 0% fee.

Posted From bitcointalk.org Android App

hello,

i have a question that might seem stupid?

i see on this web some people selling 1gh for 0.0130BTC / Hash. If I have 200GH, I make 448USD per month.~ (0.71 BTC / month)

Now, if I sell 200GH @ 0.0130BTC = 2.6BTC (per day?)

How can this be profitable for people "regular mining"? (or purchasing my GHs)

thank you

You'd be buying 200GH of hash power in the cex.io exchange for 2.6BTC. As opposed to, say, buying a 180GH AntMiner S1 for under 1 BTC. At least .013 is better than the .04 people used to sell hash power for there, but it still makes no sense to me at all.

Not only does the prices not make any sense but the market either.  Why would anyone speculate/trade/invest in a product who's value will drop due to difficulty inflation?

It is just hot potato with money... don't get stuck holding the "shares" lol.

wouldn't it make sense for me to be selling 180gh all the time instead of mining?

Cex doesn't allow you to sell your own GHS to other people. Only their own GHS.

The market right now at 0.013 is definitely broken. By broken I mean engineered to take advantage of ignorance. Anyone buying at current prices while the futures contracts are available are severely mathematically challenged. It is very easy to calculate mining profit per day over the time remaining until the futures contract matures and will find that the futures contract is cheaper.

Still it is possible to make money trading, but at any moment those manipulating the market may take profits which will drop the price back to something reasonable. What dandirk said: Don't be holding the hot potato when that happens. The closer we get to the maturity date of the contracts the more obvious this will become.

Oh, I completely misunderstood. I thought you were, somehow, able to sell your own GHs... That is why I simply couldn't understand wtf was going on.

Seriously... you just need 10 seconds to find out whether or not you should pay 1BTC for 10GH? (or whatever)..

A pool where people could sell their own GH...........

That's a very interesting idea.

Learned this lesson the hard way!

I accumulated over 1THs on GHash during a relatively stable period where pricing didn't fluctuate much.  I even made a few satoshis day trading.  Then came a long series of their infamous "waterfalls".  It was too late for me to get out without a huge lose and then greedily waiting for a modest price bump compounded my loss.

My (far fewer) coins are now safely back in my wallet.  Enjoy the low variance that you get from mining on GHash but stay away from trading unless you are a VERY savvy trader!  I could have added about 8 Antminers to my farm with my loss.  :(

Holy crap...

Anyway, I completely misunderstood how GHash worked. I thought you could "sell" your own GH from your mining devices (somehow!) and couldn't understand how someone would be purchasing 1 GH for an outrageous price that would never make ROI.

I guess they are just trying to make money out of people who think maybe they can buy a few GH cheap, sell for more money while they bank a shitload of money.

GH value decreases as difficulty increases.

My Daily Hash Rate is higher than that of my highest Hourly Hash Rate, according to the stats at GHash.

My daily rate was 211, whereas the hourly rates ranged from 199 to 209.
My payout was 21.1 mBTC with 24h57m since previous payout.

Why is the daily rate not the average of the hourly rates?
And what is likely to be my real rate?
Could I have done better in another pool?

Your real rate is never really real.  It is only an estimate by the pool.  Someone can explain it much better than I can.  But anyways, the longer sample period, day vs hour, is going to be most accurate.

Would never work, anyone could unplug their machine and run away with the money lol.

Just block the ability to withdraw the funds until you delivered.

ghash is now only 21% but what is more interesting is what is this unknown that is 31% of the network now

http://i59.tinypic.com/spdiqs.png

Really, you don't know what that is. It is a combining of all the different miners that the site has no difinitive identification for.

most of that unknown is KNC

someone else makes their own chart and lists it

Well, I just moved 30gh over to Nastyfans. Let's see what p2pool can do over the next week or two. I'll move another 300gh tomorrow. Or maybe tonight if I can figure out if my shares are being accepted to the right wallet.

C

No, if you put a bit of effort in, you find only 7% unknowns: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=77000.0

I will personally pay a visit to anyone known to be using ghash and punish them. Tactical loadout on the rifle in hand.

It only takes a "little" effort because of the large effort organofcorti already puts in each week.