Bitcoin Forum

Deepbit is down along with other pools (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3889.msg570739#msg570739). As of right now, the chart shows over 50% of all mining power is in the 'other' category. See here: http://bitcoinwatch.com
Nobody is forking the chain are they?

Everything is going to be just fine. If it is an attack, it will take a while before a significant forking can occur. The miners will certainly reemerge before then.

Relax.

The revenge of BitcoinEXpress for being banned.

Ahh Troll, I know thee well! All I've got to say is Fork You! ;D
I'm glad, I was getting sick of NOT having Cosby Coinz!

I've been trying bitminter with Death and taxes up there..

Come on over! :D

That pie chart didn't change for weeks if not months.

Yesterday it had deepbit on there.  Not sure how accurate it was or how often it was updated but deepbit is kinda hard to miss.

It could be that miners are working at deepbit, but you cannot get the reporting because the site is down.

can anyone mining at deepbit confirm.?

edit:  the 'other'  is deepbit if this is the case

No.  The 'other' category is all the blocks produced by miners not known to be associated to a pool, including all of the pools that bitcoinwatch is not yet aware of.  It doesn't, in fact, mean anything at all other than that more than 50% of the current hashing power is anonymous.

mr. bitcoin, you still selling those oval BTC stickers? I've been meaning to pm you but got lazy

Slush is down now too  :o

If you are in a pool which is down and are concerned about network security the best thing you can do is start mining.

Either with another pool or solo.  Anything to keep aggregate hashing power up.

I don't think this is a 51% attack but everyone can treat it like a "fire drill". :)

this is bad medicine

This. If everyone mining in a pool switched to mining solo, the end result for network security (if not personal income) is the same, yes?

Yup.  Only change would be some increased revenue volatility for the miner which is a small price to pay for network security.
The pool I am in is still running solidly, even stales are low so it must not be part of the DDOS target (so far).  
Still if it went down I would flip over to solo mining.

damn....  no way for me to change till i get home....

I saw this posted on reddit today, could be a useful tool: http://pi.uk.com/bitcoin/orphaned-blocks

no mining at slush's pool. no mining at deepbit either?

deepbit = down
btcg     = having issues too
slush    = down


hmm, i guess we're having a 51% and it's not a coincidence, i'm not moving a cent from my wallet  :-\

Maybe you should? This is the chance for double spending :)

+1  ;)

there was a price jump to 4.45....   :o  I would expect the price to drop   

http://mtgoxlive.com

http://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chs=350x200&chd=t:64.23,16.01,8.28,3.53,2.50,2.05,1.77,1.62&cht=p&chf=bg,s,00000000&chl=other|btcguild|ars|Eligius|ozcoin|bitcoins|mainframe|bitclockers

Slush is gone from the graph and other is much bigger.

So now what? Game over?

Just because "other" is  "bigger", it doesn't mean anything.  Just the whole graph is smaller..  That is unless someone is throwing 6 TH of their own miners at the network right now..

Guys.  

the 'OTHER"  is obviously the downed pools hashing power.  everybody is still mining with them, it is just the front end that wont answer http calls.

I think the graph showing names or not does only mean if reporting is working or not. 

it could be that mining works just fine (someone above posted he was mining at deepbit right now)

I can confirm that I have several miners down at slush.  A bunch more at smaller pools unaffected.

I think you're right. If you look here (http://pi.uk.com/bitcoin), I think they tag blocks by known IP and they see all the big pools still generating blocks.

No everyone isn't mining.

Many users of deepbit report connectivity issues and none of my miners can connect to slush.  It looks like some miners may still be able to connect but not all of them are.

Still other isn't necessarily bad.  My slush rigs switched to solo so they would be "other" too.

+1

I've got access to two of my three miners right now, and neither of them are able to connect to slush's pool, which is where I was at when things got crazy.  Don't think anyone is mining at slush's right now...

Nice link.  Slush last block was prior to the start of connectivity problems but good to see the other big players are still producing blocks. 

Im mining @ slush's again...

That's good news.

yep. me too, just came up.

Looks like his website is still down tho...

Me three.  Just switched all 4 rigs remotely.

Whew!

DOSing the major pools isn't what I think of as a "51% attack", but whatever.  Whether or not the pools are under attack or not is of little concern to myself.  The overall security of the network is not really under threat, since 10 Terahashes per second isn't a mark reachable by any known network or supercomputer.  This does highlight the risks to the bitcoin network at large associated with pool mining.  Concentrating the mining to a single server for the purpose of income stability also creates central points of failure/attack.  I don't mine in pools for this exact reason, and don't think anyone with any substantial hashing ability should do so.  10K small lights are harder to shoot out than a dozen really big ones.

My pool is back up. Those DDoSes are so boring to maintain :/

+1   it is easier to consequently do so if you have a large farm or a big pile of coins already, though.   :-\

I am connected to deepbit and the miners are all still running.  However the web site does appear to be down at this time.  There does seem to be an intermittent communication problem between my miners and deepbit.  They may be under attack (again).

If the two largest pools were really down the overall hash rate would have dropped a lot.  So I expect the pools are running but they are unable to report back their results (back to Bitcoin Watch) due to some other web site issue/attack.  Since Bitcoin Watch cant associate the hashing with any pool it lumps the remainder of the current hash rate into "other".

So I belive the "other" just represents the normal hashing activity of the pools.

This is very simple.  Bitcoinwatch averages blocks over the last 24 hours.   If you have everyone producing 0 blocks (this isn't the case) and reporting that the "Other" pie chart is 100% based on past block rates alone.

This is used to happen during difficulty jumps up.  For the 24 hours following the jump in difficulty that chart would compute how much hashing power would be required to get the average # of blocks over 24 hours at current difficulty, compare that to reporting hashing power of the pools and assign the rest to "other."  Since the average was hashed at a lower difficulty you'd get these giant "Other" slices showing up every retarget.

This brings me to another point..  in a conversation with a colleague he said " What if IBM or some other entity with tons of computing power bring it online all at once?"  He mentioned something on the order of "3 trillion teraflops/sec" or something that one company has.  

I did some rough calculations of the TFlops of of all the vid cards encompassing 11Thash.  I think I came to about 100,000 on our network.

I know that teraflops does not equate directly to hashing power, but I would like to know if anyone knows of the biggest competition to our network?

I think the K Computer in Japan does 8 petaflops, and im pretty sure that is the current fastest supercomputer.

But not sure about any farms out there...

Converting the number of hashes to petaflops is a controversial issue.  The cacluation done at bitcoin watch is considered "high" by most.  However using it for the sake of argument the Bitcoin network would be about 137 petaflops.  If we take even 1/4 of that as the real number the Bitcoin network is pretty darn safe from an outside attack.

Here are some numbers for other distributed networks (from wikipedia).  Since Bitcoin only does integer operations it is hard to compare apples to apples:

BOINC – 5.634 PFLOPS as of April 4, 2011.[4]
Folding@Home – 5 PFLOPS, as of March 17, 2009[5]
As of April 2010[update], MilkyWay@Home computes at over 1.6 PFLOPS, with a large amount of this work coming from GPUs.[6]
As of April 2010[update], SETI@Home computes data averages more than 730 TFLOPS.[7]
As of April 2010[update], Einstein@Home is crunching more than 210 TFLOPS.[8]
As of June 2011[update], GIMPS is sustaining 61 TFLOPS.[9]

Also there is a thread here somewhere discussing all this and attempting to claim Bitcoin is the largest for the world record book.

No but if you had say 4TH of computing power knocking (or trying to) the largest pools off the network could be a precursor.  The 3 largest pools have ~6TH combined.  The 5 largest pools have ~7TH combined.  Disrupting the network softens it up for a 51% attack.

Still it looks like operator of BTC Guild thinks this happened because he pissed off a botnet operator (by blocking him from his pool)

Well now that is interesting.  I have connected my miners to Slush, BTC Guild and Deepbit and they are all three down as of now, so I moved on to a smaller pool.  I am monitoring the "big three" and I cannot connect to any of them at this time!

Weird I was kicked off slush but about 30 minutes ago I was able to reconnect and have been able to stay connected.  Looks like denial of service is partial?

Spoke to soon.  Had to know I was going to jink myself. I can't connect anymore.  Blerg.  Well I will drop 6GH to solo mining at least for rest of the day.

O well I have decided to spread my hashing power between the big three plus my favorite small pool (BTC Mine).  I have been monitoring them and they are up and down and up and ...  But on the average I am hashing at one or more at all times.  Good enough for today.  They will eventually get tired of wasting their power on the DDoS and go away.

Clearly just a preview from BitcoinExpress of what he has in store for us if the price falls to low and miners drop out and the network is weakened.

BUY BUY BUY !!!

BCE has stated that he has a lot of Bitcoins so he has no plans to mess with the Bitcoin network.  But I think it is a good idea to introduce at least one new alt coin chain per week in order to keep him busy killing them off - sort of like the whack-a-mole game :)

BTW I am "doing my part" and turning on all of my idle miners and running them "just in case".  Don't know if my piddly amount will help but there you go.

It's possible this is not a "51% attack" but something much simpler, bringing down a pool as large as deepbit, slush or btc guild this close to a difficulty change will 1, decrease the number of new blocks found slowing the flow of new blocks into exchanges theoretically temporarily stablizing the prices(this would happen at any point a major pool went offline however) and 2 cause the difficulty drop to be longer than normal by affecting the blocks/hour ratio even if done for a day this would cause a greater than predicted difficulty drop and allow said attacker to mine more coins than prior durng the next cycle

That is what I was thinking.  I believe we are running at about 5 blocks per hour and the retarget is about 1.5m and only about 100 blocks away so if this keeps up long enough the difficulty may drop below 1.5m.

This is exactly why concentrating too much hash power in a few pools is not a good idea.
Better to mine at a smaller mid-sized pool :)

No, it's basically the same. With such massive botnet power there's no problem with flooding tens of smaller pools. Now attackers don't do that because 70% hashrate is on three pools, but they'll change attack vector if hashrate distribution will change.

https://rfcpool.com/ still working just fine  ;)

I like you conspiracy theories Deslok! Plus, less difficulty is hard to hate.
Question, is it better to point small (~2 Ghash) guns at a operating pool during times like this, or is it better to go solo? My line of thinking is it's better to be in a pool because you'll contribute to solving a block faster, and that's what effectively hinders any 51% bs. Going solo with anything less than 10 Ghash seems wasteful of precious block solving time.

BTW, I'm at BTC Guild for now.

It is my understanding that Ghash's count towards blocks found either  solo or at a  pool equally well.

If the case of a widespread DDOS attack, mining solo is better so that you can relay transactions, taking load off of the pools. I am currently reading the forum instead of geting some CPU miners up. If the attack continues, I may have two (relatively power hungry) CPU miners at two separate IP addresses.

I have been planning on setting up a netbook CPU miner drawing 12Watts (for the near term), but have not set that up yet. The other CPU miners I have available probably draw 100W each. I am also concerned about bandwidth use and have not set up Bandwidth monitoring on my end yet.

+1

This.  Being in a pool doesn't solve a block faster.  The only disadvantage to solo mining is variance.  The only advantage to a pool is reduced variance.  If you are in a pool you STILL have the exact same variance in your individual block solving times the pool merely smooths the financial aspect of that variance.

...you mean variance, right ?

Yeah variance is likely better word choice.  Pretty sure the words are interchangeable though.  right?

In statistics variance=(volatility)^2, but colloquially the two can be interchanged.