Bitcoin Forum

Someone else just posted a thread similar to this one, but it bears repeating. We need to have one or two of these type threads on the front page EVERY DAY until we beat back this corrupt organization that can utterly destroy bitcoin if we aren't careful. (And ok can't destroy it but can irreparably harm it and cause the price to drop 80% or more overnight).

The bitcoin community needs to take this issue MUCH more seriously. It's not an area where we can afford to be lazy about....or try to be polite and "nicely" as them to please don't do a 50% attack...over and over and over.

Boycott them permanently and encourage others to do the same and keep doing so, well into the future.

I encourage others to post threads like this too.

And here is a very telling link:
http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/news/bitcoin-mining-pool-ghash-io-is-unapologetic-risk-theoretical-51-attack/2014/06/12

I think boycotting them will serve to be futile, as they are purchasing more hash power as they grow. These guys want to hit that 51% and they will not stop until they do.

Remember all that profit they earned by selling the overpriced mining power on CEX.IO - where do you think it's going....

spam aint gonna work

Boycotting them will not work, as still newbies and so, will join cex.io for gaining profit and such and making much thread won't help either.

I can't think of a good solution right now.

GHASH are the best, fuck the rest!

Its a prisoner's dilemma. You can't rely on participants' good will, need to address the issue from the root.

Just give them some time, I believe they would come out with a solution like implementing fees.

Says the user with the Ghash website link.   ;D

Centralized mining pool doesn't necessarily mean the best, especially in regards to a pool that size could possibly execute on the Bitcoin network.

When it comes to Bitcoin mining pools, bigger is definitely not better.  Just means low variance, and higher potential 51% attack risk.

So, there must be some better pools and services.
And when someone build very good pool - there is a risk it will gain 51% of power.

PS. cex/ghash wouldn't use any bugs and vulnerabilities. It will only discredit bitcoin network and these sites. They have enough profit not to risk in such stupid way.

Because you personally know the intentions of the owners of the pool?  For some people a million might seem like a lot of money.  There are many billionaires in the world who have enough wealth to buy every single BTC at today's price, and that would be chump change for a government sponsored endeavor.

Please try to feed this bullshit to somebody else , because they have already perform the double-spending attacks.

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

Thet would be impossible without profit-fools like you.

I can only repeat what I already posted on the same topic earlier. Pools will always grow too big if we don't change our understanding of what mining is for. Complaining to people because they head for profit simply doesn't work. What Bitcoin needs is enough diversity of different policies for including transactions in blocks. This will force people to decide on the pool whose policy best matches their own interests, thereby leading to an equilibrium between different policies.

I don't know if I'm in favor of this. The whole idea of bitcoin is growth and these guys are growing.

If we're going to prevent a legit business from operating, we might as well start tainting coins and implementing Mike Hearn's fancy pro-govt security features into the protocol...

And that's why we can't have nice things. Indeed they're a nice pool but we should decentralise the hashrate for the sake of the network's safety. I agree that other pools have to compete too though. Ghash is all shiny and stuff.

you totally missed the boat… one of the goals IS growth, but an even BIGGER goal was decentralization …. You might want to get your slide deck right… I do not and will not use Ghash for this very reason.. having this much market share is not and will NEVER be good for BTC … anything over 35 is bad IMO . waiting until it got to 49 in order to pull the fire alarm was a BAD move for the community ...

I like slushies..

F GEO!

boycott by adding more hash power to other pools, thats it. Together we are strong, much stronger than ghash itself.

I've replied to other threads like this one with the same response.

ghash has better features than other pools and doesn't rape you with fees & cex.io iteself is a pretty unique service and other similar services to it that I've seen are simply horse shit in comparison.

So unless you can find a way for humans not to be greedy, the solution is for other pools & cloud mining companies to step up their game. 

Also I think these threads are utterly useless, bashing them is so childish.

if all people leave ghash, where will the go?

better off to have a 51% ghash, then a 51% unknown.

BTCGuild, Eligius, Slush, Bitminer, Multipool, F2Pool, P2Pool

The problem is that no one matches cex.io's service.

Cex.io's totally up to date.

The others are living in the stone age...

What's wrong with BTCGuild?  I've been mining there since December, and it's always up.  If there's any outages or downtime it's for like a couple minutes tops.

Stable as a motherf#cka.

Yes, then you will have the problem of BTCGuild having 51%.

Unlikely.  Both Eligius and BTCGuild have always been in the low to mid teens at their highest, and are both very fair pools.

Plus, that Eleuthria guy seems like a stand up guy.   8)

The longterm solution can´t be "boycott pool X"

The different pools have to improve to get their service up to the level of GH.io, not the other way around.

That means merged mining atleast NMC, 0% pool cost, TX cost payout etc.


Also, for 51% attacks a pool would need to WITHHOLD a large number of blocks from the network, building a side chain which it can verify with its own hash power.
As long as GH.io pools` blocks show up fairly regularly, there is no reason to worry.

I'm not talking about up or down time but the ease of access to trade or sell giga hashes with bitcoins.

That you physically don't need to have a miner is mindblowing and no other pool seem to copy this idea.

It's all a matter of time when physical mining will be impossible for the individual.

Cloud mining is the future and I think the major pools should addopt it due to 51.

You really need to have a flexible mindset in this business.

P.S. besides for clouds I think BTCGuild is the 2nd best after cex.io/ghash.io.

So basically you want somebody else to subsidize your mining overhead?  You are willing to destroy BTC for the extra income gained from having 1% less fee?  how shortsighted are you fools?

So other than having the ability to sell miner's hashes through CEX.IO, how extra is ghash.io benefiting from this?  Care to question that?  You think they're offering the pool from some sort of benevolent or altruistic view towards miners?

You don't have to be a cynic to understand that such behavior is not seen in the business world.  Something doesn't smell right.  The fact you peons are willing to overlook that coincides with the fact you are late bandwagoner  ::)

No, I am saying the longterm solution is creating awesome pools with nice payout systems.

Eligius works with 0% fees just fine.

At the end of the day the "consumer" decides on which service to use. He votes with his choice for the model he likes most. That vote should be respected.

I am not willing to destroy anything, as I am not the destroyer. Even a 51% pool doesn´t destroy anything without malicious intent.

As explained, the pool would first have to withhold a large number of blocks from the network to then submit them at once, verifying each block on its own and creating a new sidechain,
which would then become the main chain.

Personally, I don't think ghash going to attempt a 51% attack. I'm more concerned with the large private pools out there, granted they don't have 45Ph/s to do a 51% yet, but in the coming months, who knows what someone with enough private cash might do. Ghash would have to create a large forked block chain with all the petahashes at their disposal and the evidence of that would be pretty clear.

From a mining perspective, since PPS has pretty much gone away, you have to throw your hashes at the pool that solving the most blocks otherwise you won't make as much money. Less blocks solved by the pool = less money. If btcguild started PPS again, I'd go back to them, but they stopped PPS, so you need to go with who's going to pay the most for the hashes. P2Pool was awful, I took a 45% income hit when I gave it a try.  Maybe in the future when (or if) fees kick in, but right now p2pool doesn't pay like the larger pools, so there's little point. In short, if PPS comes back into the play, great, otherwise there's no incentive to move out of a large pool.

The whole concept of decentralization is that you don't have to trust or rely on any 1 agency.  There is no Federal Reserve deciding fiscal policy.  Just miners who decide by majority which protocol to follow.

When somebody acquires 51% you now have to trust that they will have good intentions and not use their power maliciously (as we have seen with the greedy banksters around the world).  Ghash.io has already shown once that they were willing to double spend.  The warnings were made before the first 51% event and still they double spent.

If they control 6 blocks in a row and 51% of the power they essentially can throw away any work submitted by other pools or solo individuals.  Essentially rendering them judge, jury, executioner.

I cannot blame the pool ops for this.  Eleuthria, wizkid, and at one time Slush ran better pools than anything ghash.io could hope to become.  The better pool is not fancy graphics or highest payout.  It's the one where the pool op is responsible to the Bitcoin community.  Ghash.io has shirked that responsibility from day 1, and apparently mindless peons support that in their avarice.

Blatantly wrong.  If 2 people are mining on a small pool with 600MH/s (say 1 USB miner stick each) and you happen to solve a block each person gets 12.5BTC, an amount you would never see if you were on a big pool.

Only thing big pools aid with is decreased risk of variance.  You don't make any more money mining with in the big pond.

Over the same period of time, mining on a small vs large pool (with the same fee) gives you statistically the same amount of payout.

P2Pool is the only pool that supports the main idea behind Bitcoin: decentralisation.

if you think that causes them to boycott
cex.io in my opinion not the right choice to make cloud GHS mining as prices can change at any time,
cex.io if I do not think the cloud point extraction but more trading to GHS

Yes, you're 100% right. 1 miner can solve a block and get the reward no matter what hashing power they have, even a 1gh/s usb miner.  Now, in reality, the more hashes you process per second, the likelihood (not probability) of you solving a block is greater. I used p2pool for a week and earned 45% less BTC than I earned with the same hashing power using ghash.
Bottom line is p2pool is pplns plus a % fee.  Oh wait, I forgot the 0.5% subsidy a node gets for the solved block.  ::)

p2pool is not popular because it suffers from the fact that miners will always act in a way to directly maximize their profits. We can cry in our cups all day about 51% and how p2pool should be this amazing solution. However at the end of the day, it's just less money in the miners pocket.

You can Solo Mine it can take up to 4 days to crack a block. I have little money. $(

I agree with your generalized statement that I bolded, but consider this:
Would you rather have 9.5 BTC (assuming the pool took a 5% fee) worth 650 USD or 10.1 BTC worth $580 USD.  You think BTC price has fluctuated down for no reason?  The scare of 51% is clearly dominating the market.

Now let's play this worse case scenario - Ghash.IO does do some stupid attack and BTC become a has been coin leading to some other coin such as LTC or PPC taking over (LTC still has issues with centralization).  How much are you 10.1BTC x $0 USD worth now - nothing.

If miners are looking strictly at gaining the most BTC then yes they are more likely to get them at Ghash.IO -  but they are showing their stupid side.  Greed makes people stupid and illogical - and that is clearly evidenced here.

For some of us who have 10K+ BTC this is not a casual hobby but our future, and I don't give a rats ass about some 1-2% more mining income when I'm risking the whole boatload.

I wondering how much they are paying for new cryptography chip accelerator ...

build better alternatives , reward users for usage , easier said than done.

I've been having much better payouts since leaving the Guild.

Hmm, seems okay of late:

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

Don't like Eligius, because I'm not a big time miner, so I'd rather take the 0.01 BTC as often as I can.

Average 95% doesn't look too hot to me.

Hmm, look at the first 3 numbers, that's the recent history.  Lately, it's been pretty good.

its hard to boycott them when they are so above competition
but it must be done, throw them in hell  ???

poeople will only boycott cex when they realize how much cex is ripping them off or if they get shown where esle to mine for way less fees
just saying boycott cex will not work!

so post links to some of the better pools

I've been following this thread and one thing becomes more and more clear by the day: 51% attack is truly the doomsday scenario for bitcoin.  There is no solution.

I've read Satoshi Nakamoto's paper and the assumption he makes at the outset is that in the world of bitcoin, a dishonest miner can never and will never obtain more hashing power than a group of honest miners.  He never prepared for the scenario of a 50+% miner on whose honesty we must all depend.  He alludes to the fact that should that happen, bitcoin is doomed.

Let's look at possible solutions:

1.  Let's "convince" all the fellow miners to abandon the pool that is proven to be dishonest....

This goes against human nature.  If you build any system, economic or political where the "greater good" is at conflict with what an individual perceives to be in their immediate interest, the individual's interest will win out.  This is why communism and socialism have failed.  History is full of examples where any attempts to "shame" greedy actors into behaving in socially-centric manner have not had any success.  Humans will only act in socially-centric manner if and only if that action benefits them individually.  Why do you think the US government is borrowing from our children $0.40 for each $1 they spend?  Because our children can't vote them out.

2. Let's provide a technical solution that penalizes pooling. 

So, this will only put the casual miner (like myself) out of business.  We will all be forced to sell our hardware on pennies on the dollar to the "organized miners" who all mine individually but share the same wallet between their 20,000 S1 miners.  Net effect is exactly the same.  There's going to be several such actors and it would be very easy for, say the government of China, to just buy out enough of them to get the 51% control of hashing power.  And, they proceed to destroy the Bitcoin.  I should not single out China here... the US government would do the same in a heartbeat.

3.  There is no 3rd solution.  The miners must follow the longest chain.  If they don't, there will be multiple chains and no one will ever know if their transaction is confirmed.  Longest chain is controlled by anyone who controls 50.1% hashing power.  That actor must be "trusted" to not double-spend.  Regardless of whether destroying bitcoin is or isn't in the best interest of the controller of 50.1% hashing power, the fact we have to trust such an actor is categorically and fundamentally contradictory to the entire premise of bitcoin, whose motto is "trust no one". 

Perhaps smarter people can figure out a solution here, but I just don't see it. 

Boycott a pool is not any type of solution. I find it amazing people are still on this subject and their only focus on hating GHash for what...offering a better product than others. Meanwhile the Bitcoin devs are not particularly concerned over 51% 'easily seen and defended against'

And in case no one noticed in the last 7 days the total hash rate of the Bitcoin network has increased by 50 PETA Hashes (from about 85PH to 135PH) and difficulty is due for a 25% jump next up. Personally I think that is a more noteworthy change in the network dynamic than the  topic of this thread.

GHash isn't planning to launch any attacks, they've stated it themselves.

who are ghash anyway? ...... I mean, really?

They said they would never gain 51% of the hashrate ..... they did!
They said that they would allow users to use other pools ... but didn't!
They said that they would limit new membership ..... they haven't!
Now they say they will never launch a 51% attack on the bitcoin network ..... bearing in mind that ghash has been accused of double spending before, their assurances do not inspire much confidence in my opinion!

What do you guys think?

I think many of the newer users commenting here haven't taken the time to research what has been going on since 2009.  People say Ghash.IO would be shooting themselves if they did such an attack - the very same people not knowing that they have double spent before and there is proof of this behavior (not just conjecture).

They do not participate in the network development (as evidenced by their minimalistic communication) and they have no intentions of proactively slowly their growth despite what they say.  Take an example from BTCGuild who got to 40% last year - the pool op eleuthria raised pool fees and moved off getwork.

Ghash.io has not done a single thing to retard their growth.  Go on living with naivete - I think I know where the retard is...

The problem is not with GHASH.  It is not relevant whether they are or aren't "evil".  The problem is with bitcoin itself if neither protocol nor the community are able to address one "evil" actor. 

If people are to invest their life savings into bitcoin, they need to be guaranteed there is no inherent problems with the protocol.  There clearly is.  The whole point of bitcoin is that we don't trust the government to do the right thing.  Yet we put trust in some random pool with no built-in mechanisms to automatically prevent it from being able to do something evil?

Just because end-users are evil through their ignorance is no reason for a pool-owner to shirk it's responsibility.  Ghash.IO owes nothing to anybody, just like you owe nothing to a man who may have been hit by and car and is laying in the street.  They could do a much better job like another pool has already demonstrated in the past - but they refuse to. If that doesn't smack of arrogance or contempt....

Mark my words, I have a feeling Ghash.IO is not tagging all their blocks now. I suspect that they are trying to make it appear that they are not getting anywhere near that 51% hash mark in order to bring users back … The end result will be the same as all their past shady moves…  People need to look at their past, they don't give up … and they are not going away .

The problem is not the small miners - the problem is the large mining farms/groups.  If every small miner boycotted GHash.io, it would be a very small percentage.  If you calculate all of the current hashing power, it is around 100Ph/s, currently GHash.io has around 42 or 43.  When they went over 51%, one or two large miners voluntarily pulled 8-10 Ph/s of hashing power, so as not to cause things to come crashing down.  We need to blame someone who owns 5 or 10 percent of the total hashing power pointing that power to Ghash.io.  I don't care about all of the conspiracy theories that surrond GHash, the thing that I care about is that the only thing that the small miner can do is to mine at GHash or shut down their mining rigs.  Mabe we should all solo mine and if we all get lucky, we can throw GHash a curve and cut down on all the blocks.

If you are a small miner, where can you go today to mine?  And I don't mean to mine at a profit, but to minmize your losses and come anywhere near breaking even!  Just like every small miner, I tried a lot of the different pools - Slush, BTC Guild and GHash.io, just to name a few.  I was very happy to mine at Slush's pool, because I could make more that at the bigger mining pools.  I was making twice as much with Slush then with GHash.io and BTC Guild, but then a few weeks ago, the perfect storm hit Slush - the difficulty increased and the hashing power more than doubled - it went from 2Ph/s to over 5Ph/s.  Slush went from finding 8-10 blocks a day to only 3-4 and the payout was cut in half because of the increase of hashing power.  Maybe some of the large miners pointed away from GHash.io to Slush and other pools to reduce GHash's 51% several weeks ago.

For all these reasons, I am shutting down my 10 S-1 Antminers and putting them on Ebay.

Rock53 -- please take the time to do a bit more research.  Much of what you said may be your experience but is not based on sound understanding of mining.

The perfect storm you mentioned, difficulty increased and hashing power more than doubled isn't a perfect storm....  Difficulty increased happened *because* hashing power increased.  The two are not independent of each other.  The only thing you should pay attention to is difficulty increasing.  It represents the bitcoin protocol trying to adjust so that blocks don't get solved more often than about every 10 minutes, no matter how much hashing power there is.

If Slush's made you twice as much as GHash or BTC Guild, then you were simply getting lucky for a short period of time.  If you waited a bit more with Slush's you'd see it all equalize.  The only reason to choose one pool over the other is their reporting tools and their consistency in paying out.  Other than that, you will see the exact same payout over time (perhaps more for a day or two then less for a day or two).  The smaller the pool, the greater the variance and length of high days vs. low days.  But over time, they will all be the same.

As to you selling S1's .... great idea... their value is approaching 0 due to their electric inefficiency so good time to bail.