Bitcoin Forum

Move to other pools. Stop mining on deepbit.

Here’s (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_computing_power) what someone with 50% of the network’s hashrate could do.

https://i.imgur.com/k1vlV.png

I think we need Tycho to voluntarily block new people until he is below 33% (and that is a high amount already) of the hash rate. And convince the slush guy to do the same too.

How does BTC Guild compare with the others in that pie chart?  That's my favorite at the moment.

And yes, I agree, Deepbit is too big.

I don’t know, the pie is from http://bitcoinwatch.com/.

It should be in every miner’s self-interest to switch from deepbit to another pool. If you don’t, you risk that the Bitcoins you mine could become worthless.

Also, deepbit has a fee of 3%. Other pools like Eligius do much better than that.

I use two pool. 50% at deepbit and 50% at btcmine   ;)

And convince Tycho and Slush not to conspire with each other :)

Problem is the others just aren't good enough. Slush is too unstable and I never returned to BTC mine after not getting paid for a block that took forever to finish in April. The rest are just too small, which makes it too easy to pool jump.

All IMO, of course.

Free market man, Tycho should not FORCE people out of his pool... If he provides the best most consistent server, then he should get a big slice of the pie.  Last night I watched as one of his servers went down and as promised it automatically switched over to a failover server he has.  Me not having to worry and knowing that tycho is behind the pool is worth the 3% to me.

Also I would rather have 50% in a pool be the threat then 50% in one person be a threat... I would be wary of the mining companies.  If tycho starts doing something bad miners can move off his pool and thwart his attack... if a single person had that power... what, do we all run out and buy video cards as fast as possible?

The only thing Tycho did was make a good fair pool when there was no other good option at the time.

Great, so we just wait until something bad happens, rather than preventing it from the start. This will certainly help confidence in Bitcoin as a currency.

Can you tell me when mining on Slush's pool has ever been unstable except for this one recent instance?

Tycho could just make his pool rate display a lower total to shut people up.

Come on guys we all know you are in this for the $$$. If bitcoin gets attacked the least you would care once you have your BTC all converted to $$$ !

If people would care at all about Bitcoin and its security they would stop mining at deepbit.net monopoly but as you can see they all care about the moneyz !

Slush has gone down on me at least two or three times since I started mining in March. Eligius even more than that. DeepBit has, too, but usually it's scheduled, so it's at least predictable. I personally like Eligius more, but it's just too unstable.

I'd switch over to any pool that offered Instant Payouts, That's one of the major reasons I like deepbit. I hate having to wait half a day to get confirmed on slushes pool.

No, I had only one serious downtime on mining interface, others were service restarts, which is normal on all pools. Oh, I was also DoSed twice, but it is long time ago and it wasn't total outage, pool was just slower for few hours.

Yes, I had troubles with website, but it didn't affect mining.

Eligius (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=6667.0) pays out instantly into your wallet via a generation transaction. You don’t even have to register.

Seriously, deepbit’s share of hashpower is troubling. I hope this will change soon.

Well, you cannot spend those coins before at least 100 confirmations, so it is basically the same as many other pools. Deepbit isn't "instant" too, it takes one hour to show block on the account...

Is there any open source pool software yet? Might help if anyone could easily set up their pool.

So you are saying Tycho is an attacker? Seriously?

Not necessarily, but why take the risk?

What happen if someone hack into Tycho accounts, or impersonate him with great social engineering, and smuggle some rogue code around? Or do some other evil stuff? Also, even if everyone like and trust Tycho, would you give loaded shotgun to your mom and let her point at your head while swearing that she won't ever pull the trigger? What happen if the trigger is defective?

Now you are plain and simple insulting him by saying he is defective. I am at at slush's pool for a few days now.

The point of Bitcoin is decentralization. I don’t want to trust deepbit’s operator in order to use Bitcoin. Malicious entities could easily gain the majority of the hashrate if they colluded with pool operators.

Trust is everything in a currency. If Bitcoin experiences any such problem, trust will vanish very quickly.

No, he should just increase the fees further.  He's already the most expensive and still the biggest— even if you make some downtime argument— 2% fee pays for 28 minutes/day in downtime— and deepbit has not been perfectly reliable either. I bet he could take 15% and still be at a third. 0_o

Win win.


The security concerns don't require the operators of the pool to be evil. They could be compromised, for example. And there have already been pool security compromises.

Adding to the security paranoia arguments the system reliability argument: If a pool has 50% of the hashrate and it goes down, then we lose 50% of our transaction processing capacity.  This would especially be bad in difficulty-cycles where hashrate had shrunk so that we were already behind 10 minutes / block.

Indeed, that idea is better :D

Freemarket ftw!


Someone can ask Tycho to raise his fees?

This.

People obviously think there is extra value in his pool, so he should capitalize on that and let the free market do what it does best.  Some would leave, some would stay, he would probably end up making MORE bitcoins/hr than he is now, and the bitcoin community would be more secure because of it.

It's possible that my impression of your pool is wrong, but you seem to have a lot of invalid blocks every now and then. 21 in the last 1000 blocks right now means 2.1% fewer bitcoins for me. The lack of long polling also takes a bit off the top. All in all I believe my profit is higher at Deepbit.

Majority of those invalid blocks were caused by outage, so we're still talking about this one issue before two weeks.

Has Deepbit.net gone down?

Yup, that would help.

And, thats what I'm looking for right now.
This way, I can start my own mining pool with friends and such.

Ok, example of danger of big pools while not offending them:

How to corrupt the bitcoin network:


First, create a computer with hashing power that is a little bigger than the entire network - slush - deepbit - elegius.
Second, prepare that computer to do whatever skewed thing you want to do.
Third, DDoS deepbit, slush and elegius.
Fourth, turn on the computer that you built, and enjoy your 51% of network power while the 3 DDoSed pools scramble to get back up.
Fifth... sell all your BTC?
Sixth... profit as the market crash in desperation?

The pool's site was unavailable for a few seconds - I was installing HTTPS/SSL support :) Done now.

Sigh, read your own forums, open source pool software has been mentioned repeatedly :)

URL: https://github.com/jgarzik/pushpool

Pushpool is nice, but it's not a complete solution. For instance, there's no front end to provide a web interface and manage workers and payouts.

If you're thinking about that time it went down, that was literally the only time I've ever seen or had trouble with his pool.

Just make a bounty and I'll happily build one.

A pool operator would have to be able to pull off a very large double spend to offset the long term losses from people leaving the pool for good.

The idea is that the motivation isn't economic.

The idea is that it can happen for any reason, and it can happen much easier if the main prerequisite for the attack is already in place: one person controlling >50% of the network.

The idea is that it doesn't necessarily even have to be the pool operator that does the attack.

The idea is that trust in Bitcoin, and thus the value of Bitcoins, will be lost because of the attack.

The idea is that it is in the best interests of everyone who mines Bitcoins to voluntarily keep the network healthy in order to prevent the possibility of such an attack from occurring in the first place.

hmm.. perhaps in this case it may be best if there is a safeguard built in to bitcoin to prevent shares greater than 30% on a single pool? then again, how do you determine who belongs to what? you could have 50 pools working together.. blah...

It would be interesting if there could be a technological solution to this problem. Until then, it's up to the miners to keep the network healthy for their own good. Also, an attack from a collusion of 50 pools is much more difficult than an attack from 1 pool. The more decentralized the network is, the more secure it becomes.

i meant. if you had the raw processing power to take 51%.. you could make it 50 different pools of 1.02% so it looked like 50 people held 51%... when in truth it was a single person pulling all the strings.

If you had that much processing power, odds are high that you have many other more profitable uses for it than attacking the blockchain.  Like, for example, mining with the blockchain to capture 50% of the coins produced.

What would the reason be, for someone who wanted to hurt the network, to go to such lengths if they already had the required processing power?

Only if your motive is economic. I think odds are high that someone who wants to hurt the network won't have economic motivations in mind. Well perhaps, but not certainly not Bitcoin related ones.

did you read my previous comment? <.<
I was simply poking a hole in my own argument.

Delay a response from the bitcoin community.  If the attacker only had 51% of the hashing power as compared to the running network, he wouldn't have it for long after the community became aware of it.  A call to arms would go out for every honest user to generate using any means available, and many would do so even at a loss.  This is the 'hidden reserve' capacity of the bitcoin network, and we really don't have any idea how much the community could bring to bear, and neither would any potential attacker.

I see.

Sorry, too many different threads at once!

I've been hearing this for awhile, but since my miner will only computer proof of works and send those to deepbit, can deepbit really be used to attack the network using only that?

I started mining at deepbit when it was at 60Gh/s. I left once it hit 500Gh/s. I've been at btcmine ever since.

You misunderstood the argument.  Lets say that DB is 40%, slush is 30%, eligius is 20%.   You get 11% of the network hashing power, way less than half. Then you DOS attack those three pools. You now have 51% of the _remaining_ hash power.

This attack is much harder with less pool concentration.




Yes, your computer can't even see the work it's doing for the pool because the work is hashed, it only works on the block header.  But the pool could not be evil completely undetectably. There is an argument that it's much easier for a pool to undetectably skim from their users, so if they were evil they'd do that instead... but lots of arguments against big pools have been given here which don't require evil.

i understood that part of the argument... but my point was, hiding your true operating power in multiple pools so it doesnt look like a single entity is coming ahead... is a danger.

Yes.

I agree with the OP and others: the oligopoly of the pools and the monopoly of MtGox has already made the talk about decentralized Bitcoin a pure fantasy, and a disingenuous advertising gimmick...  :D

The people who really did that were not the pool operators or the late comers. It was the early adopters who started to mine with GPU's that forced people who
couldn't afford top GPU's into pools. It wasn't enough for people like ArtForz just to get their large share as early adopters. They wanted to shovel B with clusters and become "Bitcoin billionaires" out of simple, old-fashioned greed, and just because they could...  ;) (Same with MtG, but that's a different topic...)

They are the ones who created this security issue. I think the solution should be limits built into the protocol, but they would never accept that either, because just as with the traditional Wall-Street bankers, no amount of money is enough for them... ;)

One thing i can say for myself: if Bitcoin gets attacked the DDOS-for-51% way, i am not going to "mine at a loss" to protect their fortunes, just as i wasn't for Wall-Street bank bailouts...  :D
 

This thread demonstrates why bitcoin is a joke and always will be.

You people flock to bitcoin supposedly to reclaim public, distributed control over a currency, and then you just give away the power to the first pool operator who asks for it.

What a joke.

The fact that people are actually arguing here that "deepbit would never do such a thing" is unbelievable. Is he Jesus now? Is he your new guru? I thought the entire point of bitcoin was that no one would be the guru, no one would have control.

And then you have the incredibly naive and ignorant argument that if someone abused the network people would "rally" to save it. What fantasy world is this? That's not what would happen. People would abandon the currency because they don't want to sink more money into a flawed concept and flawed community.

Amateur hour. The fact that one man already actively controls enough cryptographic power to break the validity of the currency with NO OVERSIGHT and people put their BLIND FAITH in him..... no serious person is going to have confidence in the currency when they learn that the exact exploit conditions presented by the creator have already been fulfilled, and not through investing significant personal resources either, but fulfilled because bitcoin users VOLUNTARILY GAVE AWAY their cryptographic authority to him. Amazing!

 

I am not sure what issue you had in April, but BTCMine has been fantastic as of late.  Score based has its anti-abuse advantage, but it does have a disadvantage when the pool is small; you can't stop your miner to play a game or other GPU intensive application without most likely losing payment for all the work you did in that round if it continues long after you cut.  Having said that, BTCMine is not that little anymore :)  And, it is not huge ... exactly what we need more of.   I would like to see people go to it from deepbit to the point of reducing exposure to attack, but other than that, I am glad there are a lot of choices, larger and smaller.

Except, he doesn't.  He's close to having enough power to do so, but he doesn't yet.

I wish I could object. Thank you for putting this in clear terms.

I don't mind the hour delay, It's those confirms that I do mind. It takes WELL over an hour to get 100-120 confirms. Like I said, If there was a pool that handled it almost exactly like deepbit does. I'd switch.

You can't know that SgtSpike. All you know is what he tells you.

He could easily be lying about pool statistics or could simply have his own unpublished datacenter that puts him over the top.

For all you know, the pool operators are colluding to enrich each other at the expense of everyone else.

Bitcoin is obviously deeply flawed and only gullible idiots are buying into this pyramid scheme.

How hard would it be for the top 3 pool operators to collude and skim off a few coins here and there? What is their incentive NOT to? It sounds to me like all the profit is for the pool operators here, and you suckers are just falling for the latest MLM. I'm sure last week you were buying Avon soap trying to get rich.

You are the type of people who answer newspaper ads that say "I made $10,000 per week working from home!!"

Gullible idiots who trust people on blind faith. Not the cryptographer's way.

Whatever portpho.  I've already paid for the hardware I've purchased to mine with, so... whatever.  If you don't like it or believe in it, that's fine.  I'll take my free video cards and computers, and whatever other bitcoins/cash floats my way in the coming months.  ;)

And pool operators DESERVE to take a scrape off the top.  They went through the trouble to build the pool and manage it day to day.  Of course they deserve a share of the profits!  I have no problem with that.

As far as extra skimmings off the top, well, we should probably verify that that isn't happening with the use of statistics.  But I wouldn't go so far as to say that such skimming is definitely happening without some proof to back it up.

Sure, the currency could go down the pot someday if your conspiracy theories end up being true.  Just like USD could for a variety of other reasons.  Or any other currency.  Or my house might go up in flames, or get broken in to.  I don't stop living life because there is some risk involved.

Hmm...

If this happened, couldn't I just pull my miners off of deepbit?  It's not like I sent him my GPUS or anything.  Once the "rogue code" was identified wouldn't it also be rejected by the community?

Or unless you are thinking they will DDOS for a week straight all over pools or something like that over the longterm.  But then, once again people could simply unplug from deepbit.

Honestly it sounds like the other pools want a bigger share, and thus more money.  Not necessarily for "security."

Yes.

It is already conceivable that slush and tycho are the same person.

BTC Guild does payouts on demand (pay me now button) for confirmed transactions, and unconfirmed transactions if you voluntarily donate 2.5%+. They don't however have threshold payout yet (not sure if he plans on implementing that).

I am here not to reclaim public, distributed control over a currency.  I am here simply to mine bitcoin and make a profit.  I don't really care if bitcoin fails.  There will be other cryto currency to replace bitcoin if bitcoin fails and that might be a good thing.

I conclude that most of the miners are short-sighted people directly selling their Bitcoins for Dollars. They mine on deepbit because it’s too much of a hassle to switch or they don’t really know that a single entity (or even a few entities) in control of >50% of the network’s hashrate are dangerous, and even then, as long as they can convert their BTC into USD today, they won’t care.

If Bitcoin fails, the grashoppers just move on. Nice!

Figures, the only mining pool I haven't glanced at yet..I'll try them after testing out SWE Pool for a while. Which is another new pool that supports PPS.

As mentioned before, problem would easily be solved if there were more publicly-available pooling servers with usable web frontends. You'd see a lot smaller pools of 10-100 people and would make it viable to setup pools for friends/communities (with little to no fees).

Key word is give. It can be taken away too.


That's free market principles at work. They provide a great service and people use it until they do something to lose people's trust then they go elsewhere.



If by save then you mean abandon the site and redistribute the power by going to other pools that are springing up left and right or going solo, then yes, absolutely.


People put blind faith in their federal governments, state governments, city governments, local governments, home owners associations, parent/teacher associations, and any other group that they join voluntarily. Oversight is it's own joke. Everyone thinks they know how to do it right and do it better. The difference here is that protesting is as easy as pulling your hashing power and moving it somewhere else. Until users are given a reason to do so they will keep using whatever service they choose.

The "exact exploit conditions presented by the creator" are having => 50% of the network power, which no one person has, and also that they are anonymous so that no one knows where to go looking if someone trys said exploit.

Right. This was so even before the first pool, not to mention Deepbit. For those who think it's a remote possibility, Deepbit already came really close if not over 50% recently, when Slush went down for a while...

For such people, Bitcoin is not about Satoshi's ideals, or bettering the world we live in; it's just about greed and "it's-all-about-me" personal profit... :D

No one can know if pool owners can be in cahoots with one another. At current rates, pools the size of deepbit are already making profit potentials upwards of 800-1k$ daily, not to mention the power that comes with having that much of the network.

For the record, the attack is technically possible at > 50%, but to make any real amount of return on implementing this attack would require a significantly greater percentage as it would be noticed rather quickly if the attacker was only able to build a new chained block that is longer than the original at slightly faster than the rest of the pool.  As we know, however, knocking out another large pool, as happened when Slush went down last weekend or so, resulted in a flood of people into deepbit and a huge spike in hash rate, so being at 50% or so already (hypothetical case) and taking out a 30% pool with say 2/3 of them going to deepbit [considering the number of pools that exist today], that would put deepbit at 70% making it a huge threat for attack.  I do not think Tycho would do this as he is making a lot of money the way it is and destroying a revenue stream for a one time gain and somehow cashing out or spending the coins would not be beneficial for him.  More likely is a remote attacker taking over the pool.  I am glad measures are being taken to to avoid such an attack [by at least a few pools], but there are those out there, with enough motive, that will eventually attempt it in all likelihood given the opportunity [which is the subject of this thread].

The point of this post; an attack would not in all likelihood destroy the bitcoin economy, but it would damage it [trust would go down and apparent risk would go up and thus prices would drop].  Many people would lose funds they thought they had from the pool used for the attack, but it would be distributed, so it is probably less likely to destroy the market as destroy the pool that performed the attack [nobody would use the pool again if it had been used as a weapon for theft].  Worst case is that people would go back to solo mining making the growth of network hashing power slow or even reverse [which might be a good thing] and virtually eliminating the threat for the future.  Pools are only dangerous if used as a weapon [although they are drawing in a lot of hardware causing a "waste" of a lot of electricity that wouldn't be as great with solo mining ... many simply wouldn't solo mine].  I want to see bitcoin do well and I do not want to see such an attack ever occur and I am pretty sure that the pool operators don't either [kills their revenue stream].  Consider how fast they would have to "rechain" multiple blocks without detection to get a large loot. 

Solution?  Not sure if feasible, but if some sort of pool existed that itself was a member of all other pools and watches out for duplicate base block data to come through as shares of work then it could be detected rather quickly.  Problem .. it would take a large central database at this pool and it would cost significant money to maintain it and have the ability to compare work to past solved blocks.  I don't know if it could be profitable [and it itself could still be cracked ... but we trust banks, for the most part, with our fiat money, so there has to be some level of trust].

Let me pose this.  What would pool users do if ALL pools except one went down over the course of a few hours or minutes?  Would they jump to the one remaining pool?  Now suppose that all but the largest pool went down; would they still jump to the one remaining pool?  That is where pool miners need self control [and it is proven by history that they do not have it currently when one large pool goes down].  Honestly, I think all users should setup an alternative configuration to switch over to solo mining in such a situation or simply just temporarily shut down.  Do the people have the will?

Essentially, I think the risk to bitcoin isn't huge in the long term if such an attack were to take place, at least not if it takes place with the market at it's current size or a significantly larger size.  A potentially costly solution could keep the pools monitored and potentially offset some of the costs by paying enough miners to support it by doing the work pulled from the pools being monitored [probably not feasible, but an idea ... pool operators would payout the monitoring pool of course], and last, miners need to control their emotions and greed to avoid and stop an attack when discovered [if not too late] as I indicated.  The potential for attack and damage from it is real, but the end of bitcoin from such an attack is unlikely.

If you read this far, congratulations :)  Eventually, if this project turns out as well as expected, some larger merchants are going to get in on the currency, but that is going to require brokers to handle transactions [i.e. reversals for fraud], and accountability of these merchants to their respective government(s) for taxes.  In fact, this could already be an issue for some (I bet most people are net negative from hardware investment or barely positive, so taxes are probably not an issue for most ... yet).  Converting to fiat currency leaves a trail for the tax collectors to go after I think.  Keep receipts for your hardware and electricity investment [hobby income in the US is taxable only when profits exceed expenses of the hobby]. 

Be safe.

And, if deepbit were larger if used for an attack, how much could it net from such an attack before being discovered?  Right now, I think not that much [but still considerable ... but not enough for operators to give up their revenue stream].  I wouldn't expect pool owners to be part of it [although surprises do occur, but I don't think so for the current time frame anyway].

This thread topic is exactly why I never thought that open pools were a good idea.  That said, the ability to create more pools will lead to a proliferation of said pools competing for contributers.  So it's unlikely that any one pool could ever collect the 50% minimum in order to attack the blockchain even for a short while, as the more pools there continue to be, the less of a percentage that each is ever likely to be able to accumulate.

Once again, open source competitiveness comes to the rescue.

In a conspiracy to make 800-1k$ per day? I want in on that!

If a major pool is ever hacked, it's much more likely to be hacked quietly with the intent of the attacker redirecting the pool's earnings to himself.

In this community, how long would it take for a flood of messages to show up on the message board saying people aren't getting their payouts? I'm guessing as soon as 6-8 people posted sequentially there would be mass exodus. Even this style of attack would have limited success.

And politicians DESERVE to take a scrape off the top.  They went through the trouble to build the government and manage it day to day.  Of course they deserve a share of our tax dollars!  I have no problem with that

I meant to say that was approximately the value of what is being collected from fees @ current ghash rate, without any further control/manipulation of the system.

And both happen because you allow it. One with majority vote, and the other with usage of the service. One is much easier to solve than the other though.

that's why i solo mine :p

Yeah, I know what you meant. If you don't trust them then don't use their services. If you think they are conspiring to take down bitcoin then don't use bitcoin. If you're using bitcoin and griping about mass conspiracy then you're either in it for the money and only worried about losing it or just plain being hypocritical. This is the 3rd time this argument has come up in 2 weeks and degenerated into the hypothetical of Slush and Tyco conspiring to take over the network and/or the possibility of someone breaking into a pool and stealing/redirecting all the coins. It's old now.

So if I have 4-5 GPUS mining solo, won't they be competing against each other?   If anyone wanted to put together a real nice mining pool guide I bet a lot more people would be that route.

For the good of security, multi miner pool guide!

they won't compete, they will get unique work.

As mentioned before, they could be the most trustworthy people in the world, but that does not take away from the fact that the community should do something about what could be a potential problem. Those guys run a great service and kudos to them, their reward is the fairly easy-to-come-by fees they are picking up for running a good service early in the bitcoin game. Deviating from large pools is healthier for bitcoin in general though: only the people that are concerned with immediate profits as opposed to the success of bitcoin in general would be the ones that would indirectly promote such lopsided control.

Could you explain?  So let's say I run 3 miners and I point them to my local bitcoin -server (Which is also the wallet?)

That's all I need to do? 

Is this any different from how the larger pools work?  Will I still get the long pull etc?

1. set up bitcoin.conf properly (be sure to allow your miner's IP)
2. start in server mode
3. connect your miner to your server
4. wait for profit

that's all you need to do.

Except the community is the one causing the "problem". It's not Tyco's or Slush's fault that a majority of people are using their services! It's pretty basic nature that most people want to be part of the largest group. So far the only "do something" I have seen is to ask them to limit their member, to which I would say no if I were them. Again, this is the 3rd time I have seen the argument that they need to be regulated when people are going to them freely. The only thing that can be done it to ask/motivate miners to diversify themselves. The only way to reach them all is for the pool to disappear since some percentage of them probably don't use the forums let alone live on them. It's also not very productive to try to get people to diversify in threads like this that start out dramatic, post incorrect information, and degenerate into flaming and conspiracy.

The basis of bitcoin is a free (as in open) currency and economy, even down to the code. I'm shocked! ShOcKeD! I tell you that free market principles have sprung up. Simple stuff like, providing the best service for an acceptble fee for example. Who would have though?!

Hmm.  So does solo mining have any issues with working on stale blocks?  I notice deepbit does the "long pull" and tells me whether the share I'm working on has already been completed.

I've been mining for a few months now and I started on Slush's then switched to Bitcoin Pool then switched to Deepbit then switched to Eligius. This morning before I finally went to sleep I decided to give solo mining on my video card a try. Went and did stuff today and when I got home a couple hours ago I had already found a block! I had "found" blocks a few times when I was pooled mining but this is my first whole solo block and I am one happy camper. What are the odds? :P

Specifying "-rpcallowip=" switches from binding to localhost (127.0.0.1) to binding to * (any local address).

No need for proxies, on a LAN.

Im taking your advise and taking my 3Gh/s off Deepit.

You are missing the point that people are short sighted. They are making money now. If an attack occurs, trust in Bitcoin as a valid currency, store of value, speculator's toy, ect, would diminish rapidly and everyone mining would cease to profit from it. It's terribly difficult to imagine a day beyond tomorrow, I know.

I see arguments that a pool operator would not cut off his nose despite his face. Obviously he wouldn't. Have you people ever heard of governments forcing people to do what they want them to do. Forget the double-spend, that is child's play. The real concern is that the Bitcoin network is no longer able to be trusted because it is so easily corrupted. Who could possibly have motive to crush Bitcoin?

I think Satoshi did an amazing job, but it is difficult to see everything in the future. Hindsight is of course 20/20. Why in the name of all things holy would you tempt fate by giving away the requirements for an attack for a bit of variance security?

I have high hopes for this project, but I have to wonder where it can go when people refuse take account of their actions.

I've listened to various systems be blamed for the suffering of humanity, but when a brilliant system comes along and people manage to fuck it up regardless, I have to ask myself, is it the fault of the system or the users.

I can't wait for an attack to occur. I want to see if the resilience of Bitcoin is worth the time and effort so many have put into it.

It will go to the scape goats because as you said, people will refuse to take responsibility. Just like it's all the pool owners faults that they are so big and successful. Right?

People will manage to screw up any system they're given. Purely because someone always thinks they can do it better or it's not meeting their expectations, so they need to regulate it.

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it. - Agent K, Men in Black

I wouldn't call it an attack (though I haven't seen any details other than slush was offline), but the system recovered pretty quickly when slush's pool went down. I have quite a bit of faith that the network can recover if all the big pools were maliciously attacked to the point that were taken offline for an extended period of time. Even though I don't mine solo, I tested it before moving to a pool, I know how to set it up and could move over to it pretty quickly if need be.

Well yes, the community is the 'problem', but only out of ignorance. An astounding amount of deepbit pool users that I've chatted to don't even know how to edit their bitcoin.conf to solo mine. Once they become cognisant of the fact that distributed pools are probably a lot better (or neutral) for themselves profit-wise (and for the well-being of bitcoin's longevity and security in general), we will probably see a change. Once setting up a pool becomes easy/straightforward for users with little technical knowledge, the numbers in these huge pools will likely diminish or at least stop increasing at the rates they are.

> An astounding amount of deepbit pool users that I've chatted to don't even know how to edit their bitcoin.conf to solo mine.

An astounding amount probably don't care and aren't willing to learn how to do it as long as they are making money in the pool they are at. Unless you want to manage a bunch of people's setups manually a lot of them are probably better off left there until they come looking for the information. It depends on how they were introduced to bitcoin. Some probably got some very specific instructions on how to set it up, some got it set up for them, some set it up themselves but don't know or care about anything past that, then there's the ones who actually know more about it overall and willing and capable to learn more.

> Once setting up a pool becomes easy/straightforward for users with little technical knowledge,

No matter how easy you try to make something it will be too much for some people. No matter how idiot proof you make something they will always make a better idiot. There's only so far you can go to make it easy for the non technical that don't want to learn.

It does, but if you do an instant payout you will get all the bitcoins you've earned up to that point. That includes bitcoins that were earned after the full hour balance update.

Well, this just upsets me. I hope deepbit looses the market soon or we might have trouble.
I've used btcmine since the beginning, and I believe I will keep it that way or set up my own mining pool.

Actually, the reason why I use Deepbit is that all the others I would consider are so small. Size is one of Deepbits biggest competitive advantages, because the whole point of using a pool is to get a regular flow of bitcoins. More pools means that the remaining hashing power is spread even thinner. That just increases Deepbit's advantage.

+1

just move half of your gpus/rigs to other mine

i've always been interested in setting up a pool for my gpus. How do i connect let's say miners 4 and 5 to 1,2,3? Scenario is gpu 4&5 are in another house, how do i make the 5 gpus combine their hashing power into solving a block cooperatively? I hope I'm clear on my explanation. Any help would be very greatly appreciated!

The idea Tycho would do something with his 'powers' as soon as his pool reaches 50% is just simply stupid.

Currently (in the current market) the guy makes 1000 - 1300$ PER DAY , that is 30k to 39k PER MONTH. In untaxed money even.

He would be stupid to do anything to destabilize the bitcoin market.

So what? There are lots of entities that would like to endanger Bitcoin and they would certainly bribe/infiltrate with money that would let your figures look like peanuts. But yeah, let’s just wait until this happens and trust in Bitcoin vanishes in an instant. As long as you can get USD for your Bitcoins everything’s fine.

Yes, there's a long theoretical list of people who might like to endanger Bitcoin. If any one of them have that much cash available to them then they can also build a super cluster and/or manipulate/corner the market. Both can be accomplished pretty easily and with relative anonymity for someone with said amount of cash. Trust would only vanish for people who are only worried about getting USD for their Bitcoins.

Based on the structure of bitcoin, wouldn't sheer processing power be the least profitable way to attempt to attack it? I'm more worried about tycho losing control of deepbit; the thought that entire this currency might hinge on one individual's security measures is a little disconcerting.

Lots of people are MISSING THE GODAMN POINT.


With 3 pools having way more than 50% of power (this already happens), WE DO NOT NEED THE POOL OPERATORS TO DO SHIT, WE ONLY NEED SOMEONE TO DDOS THEM TO HAVE BITCOIN FAIL.


You people understood now?


Ok, I already wrote that before and it do not worked.



WE DO NOT NEED THE POOL OPERATORS TO DO SHIT, WE ONLY NEED SOMEONE TO SOMEHOW SHUT THEM DOWN AT THE SAME TIME TO MAKE BITCOIN FAIL.

I hope now people understand better the risk of the 3 pools with more than 50%

Bitcoin doesn't fail because the pools go down. There's still at least 1/4-1/3 of the network out there working solo and as soon as people see that the pools are down all the technical users will switch to solo and the semi-technical will be looking for information on how to go solo. The network will most likey be back to at least half speed in 6-8 hours at the most. That's a far cry from total failure!

And since both slush and bitcoinpool have both publicly acknowledged being ddos'd and they're stlll surviving it would take a lot more than that.

If any sort of takeover happens, I can garuantee you Bitcoins will be almost worthless faster than you could react and will have a very hard time ever recovering.

People will never value a currency that can be taken down this easily. No value, no currency.

In this sense a big enough botnet could kill all pools. Effectively the safest thing would be to stop pooling.

Currency exists on trust, value is secondary. Everyone seemed to trust it enough to to be making businesses exchanging it for cash back when it was US$0.80 per BTC when I first started using Bitcoin. The fact that it floats between US$7-8 per BTC is nice, but if you're only worried about it's value then apparently that's all you're into it for. Every currencies value fluctuates all the time, there is no question that Bitcoins will be minted in the future and there will be a finite amount of coins in the end. I trust that more than the US printing more money.

The idea that his pool is too large is not stupid, it is a valid concern.  If you are worried about the security of bitcoin you should try to not put such a large area of trust in anyone's hands.  While I agree it is not in Tycho's interest to do anything bad and really doubt he would..... an intrusion (attack) into his systems (online or physical) could effect the network.

Someone would either already have to have a LOT of coins, buy up a lot of them at the market, or investing in a lot hardware to get enough coins to make an attack like that worth it. They would have to accurately predict what the network hash speed after said take down would be and have more than that running. I doubt DDos could do it effectively, it would have to be a more sophisticated attack than that on all pools are the same time and something to leave them offline for an extended period of time. Compound that by pools starting to have backups on different continents now. After all is said and done, someone might try this just so they can double spend what? 100,000? 200,000? 250,000 BTC? Confidence would definitely take a hit and value would definitely plummet for sure. At best they would be getting their almost worthless coins back.

It sounds more far fetched and much harder than pool operators conspiring to pull double spend attacks.

I agree it would be great publicity, especially when the network survived. BTC might be back to $US0.25 per BTC, but it would survive like it was designed to do.

So someone get's into his network. Say they manage to take every coin in the system and send it to themselves. Say they even manage to wipe out the logs files so it can't be tracked. It would still show in the block chain. If the pool operators didn't notice it, the users surely would when they weren't getting payouts, and pretty quickly inform the pool operators. Worst case scenario they halt all mining and go into investigation mode. People see that the pool is inaccessible and go elsewhere just like they did when slush's pool went down. There's a very limited time window for an attack like that. A more sophisticated approach would be to redirect the last 2 or 3 digits of the balance, but since people with updated clients can see that and all transactions are public it would be found out eventually. Sure people would freak out, but the network would endure.

No. Simply no. Unless you intent to mine for ridiculously short period of times, every pool will provide you with the same payout minus fee in the long run. The reward for mining is to secure the network. To brainlessly jump into the biggest pool because you like the pretty numbers is a mistake, effectively using the very tool that secures the network to harm it. It's like saying human beings need water to survive and then trying to drown the guy.

If your interest is indeed lowering variance, then you should be spreading your mining power evenly among ever possible pool. Also Deepbit is the most expensive pool out there. I am wondering what kind of people make a point of paying higher fees in the process of ripping the same reward...

xD

Also assuming the motivation for such attack would be economical is a weakness too.

Suppose the US decide to get rid of bitcoin. They only need to put CIA to DDoS the 3 pools, and Roadrunner to create a chain split that make business unreliable (if not outright seemly fraudulent), as soon people start to mistrust each other unti they figure what is going on, not only the bitcoin market will crash, but people will freak out, and stop using BTC, in a worry that it will happen again, and after that we will have the issue of merging the chains again or rolling back everything or something like that.

People that assume someone will attack the network to doublespend are naive, at best. Or so greedy that they can only think in greedy terms.

 The US government would be more inclined to listen in on the network and watch transactions or just find where the pools are hosted and raid them, including Great Britain, Canada, and any other friendly countries. From there they would find out who was making the most amount of money and trace them back by IP wherever possible within their jurisdiction and build an income tax fraud case against them. This wouldn't happen for a few years though since coins didn't have much value this tax season, not many people could say they actually made a profit. No government has been able to shut down Bittorrent. They raid and seize servers that are hosting pirated movie, music, games, software, etc. but they haven't stopped it from existing. It's just psychological warfare to make people think twice before pirating. The only time they manage to take down a network is when it has a central point like Napster and Limewire.

 To think that any government or treasury would bother with bitcoin anytime in the near future seems pretty far fetched to me. There's only 6.245 million in existence at a peak ( ~8.00 ) value of about US $50 million.

obviously the solution here.. isnt necessarily that tycho's pool should be smaller.. its that it should be more reliable and spread out. say 10 pools, each one hosted in a different country on a different server... :p take out one, you only take out 10% of his total.

just telling him to shrink his pool isnt going to be effective.

Yeah, he should up his fee to 7.5% to help pay for all that too.

... right.

What kind of socialist argument is that? I should sacrifice getting a regular income to make a neglible impact on the security of the network, just for the greater good?

That would increase the variance, because Deepbit is larger than all the other pools combined. It would also be a lot more work to set up and maintain.

Two things:

First, the US government attack is a example of non-economical attack.

Second, as you said yourself, the time to take down a network is if it has a central point, and deepbit is becoming one, take down deepbit, take down BTC with it.

Make less now - hurt health of network to allow for possible attack and risk future income
Make more over time - help health of network to help prevent possible attack and secure future income

Socialist argument? LOL. More like smart argument. Did someone say no brainer already? I hope so.

1) You're not sacrificing anything. As a matter of fact, by mining elsewhere, you're increasing your profit.
2) Your own good. If Bitcoins crash due to an attack, you lose money...
3) The goal of mining is to secure the network. The reward is the consequence of that service provided. You want to rip the reward while providing the work but not caring for the service, because you're too lazy to understand what you are contributing to and are motivated by obscure, emotional perception of this network, point of view which has been defeated times and times over. A simple proof is that you are willing to pay the highest fee out there, yet you somehow try to build an argument based on the concept of income.

Mindlessly catering to the biggest group, expecting others to deal with the consequences... who's the socialist again?


No. Even right now Deepbit has variance. Tycho even provides that data on the statistic page. What Deepbit is missing in a day is what other pools are getting as extra. You really want to beat variance? Spread out.


1) Takes half a minute per worker and you're done, forever.
2) This is EXACTLY why people need to move off of Deepbit, because people like you would still be mining there a week after the pool gets infiltrated and starts being used to attack the network.

Just DDoS it when it reaches 45% of the network's hashing speed. Loic is always ready.

I have to say I choose deepbit for the insant pay option, and also cause I hate to see that uncofirmed/confirmed numbers. I just want to see one number going up and cash out my coins whenever i want to.

Simple as that.

If BTCMine had that option I would surely move on there in a second!

Well then, get off bitcoin? :p maybe deepbit is willing to take a 50BTC hit every time the block is proved solved by some one else... but most pools certainly arnt..

Your example is a poor example then. Everything is the US is about money one way or the other. Whether it's businesses supposedly being harmed by piracy or possibly losing tax revenue. The US Government doesn't care where your money comes from (as long as it's legal, and even then sometimes they don't care) as long as they get their share of it. Bitcoin is not going to be confused with US currency like the case with the Liberty Dollar.

Pools are not a central entities. deepbit is not Bitcoin, it is a large entity on the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin will NOT die if deepbit goes down, or even if deepbit and slush both went down at the same time. People would probably freak out, but they can go to other pools or mine solo. Napster was killed because the company was the network, they hosted the servers. They killed the company and killed the network at the same time. That's not the way Bitcoin works.

And if you sell your house and sleep on the street you'll save a lot of money too.

If Bitcoin goes down it wouldn't be because my measly hash rate was at Deepbit and not another pool.

I'll deal with the consequences that concerns me. Demanding that I do something I don't want because you are afraid of losing your benefits is what socialists do.

If you don't even understand that the only important factor in lowering variance is total hash rate there's really no point in discussing it with you.

Yeah, I guess I have to be really slow to disagree with your truly brilliant arguments...

Regarding the fee, you have to include what I just call the sucker fee in the smaller pools. It's the income you loose because some people are pool jumping. If you monitor the hash rate, you'll notice that it will go down on in the rounds that last a long time. All in all I'm probably earning about the same as Deepbit as I would in the other pools. If there is a difference it's neglible and one I accept to pay for the convenience.

The goddamn fee...


It would be because of the accumulated hashrate of people like you who swarm one pool and will perpetuate that practice even if the pool has been compromised, all this for no good reason.


No you won't deal with the consequences. You know you won't because you're refusing to take a minute right now to switch to another pool, which will benefit you. When shit will hit the fan, you'll just rationalize it away like you are doing now. And I am not demanding anything, I'm beating you're joke of an argument that you use as a basis to stick to Deepbit, disregarding the gapping hole it brings into the network security. I'm simply warning you, because I don't want to see Bitcoin go down. But I have no wish to use force. If the worst has to happen for your kind to understand, then so be it. The burden of responsibility is on your shoulders. I'm not the one endangering the network, you are.


From Deepbit's stat page

If you can't put it in your head with this that Deepbit has consequent variance, then there's nothing I can do for you. You're the guy thinking he should put all of his hashing power in the same pool while you say that total hash rate impacts variance. Then tell me, Sherlock, is it better to be in one pool that has 50% of the network or 3 pools that have 60%?


You are beyond slow.


Here comes the irony. Score based pools defend against Raulo's attack, Deepbit doesn't. I can't believe you're aware of that attack, yet don't understand the vulnerability nor the counter, all the while willing to stick to a pool that is vulnerable to it and has higher fees. Priceless.

http://ano.lolcathost.org/pics//the_cat_is_pushing_a_watermelon_out_of_a_lake.jpg

We are not supposed to use deepbit because they have the best features? There is no real solution to this "attack theory". Anonymous could just ddos all of the pools for the lulz then everyone can go back to solo mining. It only takes 1-2 computers running a "port fuck" attack on the RPC port to cause disruption.

You make it sound like bitcoin is like the "Death Star" and a simple shot to the exhaust will blow it up.

So guys, if Deepbit is so evil because they have the largest pool for generating unregulated, decentralized currency, could someone recommend a pool where I can make more bitcoins than I am on Deepbit with a 184 Mhash/sec rate?

its simple.
a single target is an easy target... a few large targets.. are still easy targets..
thousands of small targets without any clear 'big' targets.. make it very hard to DDOS.
if no pool held over 10% of the total share then it would mean you had ~5 targets..
if no pool had over 5%... ~10 targets...
if each pool had 10 or 15 servers... multiply those targets by 10 or 15... and suddenly your DDOS is mostly ineffective.

and if no one understands what the danger is in that 51%... then please, go back and read and stop trying to say there is no danger.
deepbit isnt evil... it just means hes making himself in to a huge target that anyone can take a shot at.

FTFY


BTCmine, BTCguild, slush's, Luke's, and all those new comers 0% fee that I see starting recently. The first page in the mining forums is filled with their official threads.

I switch off using BTCMine and MtRed

Deepbit is not evil.
It just has too much power and users.
Imagine what will happen if(when) deepbit suddenly crashes(hardware failure, police raid, zombie attack). Whining and frustration all over the board. Sudden migration of deepbit users. Other pools can't handle it and crash too. At least some of them. Hashrate falls dramatically and the network is vulnerable. Remember what happened to Mtgox? And it was just a little shake.
What will happen if someone hacks the pool server and uses it to... use your imagination.
Every event on mtgox causes price fluctuations. Do you really want to have another vulnerability?

between the two sites, they are turning the decentralized currency in to a centralized currency :p this is bad, but they arnt evil for doing it... thats just the nature of free market and monopolies.

 ???

I'll see your watermelon cat and raise you a bear facepalm.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_NURTFz-26UI/S_M-m5VqqeI/AAAAAAAABTw/kDnMbdBRzYA/s400/polar-bear-face-palm_thumbnail1.jpg

Because of this topic, I made this one: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=8783.0


Any suggestions there?

wisdom!

:( We shouldn’t attract such idiots in the first place. They don’t even care about Bitcoin.

In my darkest hour I wished Deepbit would get attacked the chain forked so that they would drop Bitcoin forever after the market crash ensuing...

If bitcoin system is that insecure then make it so. Better now than later.

I agree.

actually, yes.. i kinda agree.. force the programmers to find a solution for this issue.. though id prefer they did it before it got used :p

Well, there's the test net for that too

I think we have more to worry about from the Government getting involved than an attack from deepbit.

http://launch.is/blog/l019-bitcoin-p2p-currency-the-most-dangerous-project-weve-ev.html (http://launch.is/blog/l019-bitcoin-p2p-currency-the-most-dangerous-project-weve-ev.html)

Let's assume deepbit is secure and holy in its intentions and let's reverse the thought.  If it controls 55% of the hashing power that means no one else can control greater than 45%. So the solution is to have a pool with greater than 50% of the  hashing power and secure it like fort knox, :o

The goddamn utility bills...

With Deepbit it would very quickly be noticed if it has been compromised, exactly because of the features I appreciate. You on the other hand could not know, because for all you know it could just be a particularly long round. You're really not very good at making up claims about what I would do.

It will be impossible not to.

If you are using a pool you are endangering the network.

Yet another straw man.

Deepbit doesn't really need because of the high hash rate and 1 hr delay. It would probably be just as profitable and much easier to jump between BTCMine and Slush's pool to take advantage of particularly short rounds.

The solution is hundreds of small pool and thousands of solo miners...

You came from OCN didn't you?

If we have to worry about the government, they don't need to buy a single computer to hurt the network. If there already exists a pool with >50% of the network, .gov only needs to do what they are good at, control one guy. As the network stands right now, they only need to control two. Hell, they don't even need to control them, just replace them with someone smart enough to hurt the network.

I’ve read this three times now and can’t believe you are serious. :-\

What are you even talking about?


How? What particular feature of any pool allows you to know fake transactions have been added to the block you help solve? I can't name a single one, no matter the pool. Yet other pools are immune to this fact simply because they don't hold enough hashing power on their own to keep forcing corrupt transactions down the network's throat. Deepbit isn't. Now indulge me, name those features. Educate me with your obviously adequate way.


So why won't you deal with it now?

You understand this yet you refuse to mitigate the effect? This is getting better by the minute...

Born from the very stats your pool officially advertises?


No. Jumping in score based pools is as close as it gets to charity...

Getting clearer. Tell me if I'm getting this right, I should set up House A rigs and House B rigs with the same bitcoin.conf and wallet.dat and the credit for example when a block is found would go to the one wallet I setup for both rigs. Just trying to be a solution to this pooled mining problem. =) Thanks!

Clearly the solution is flaming each other. Seems to be working so far.

It's that more or less. The first transaction in a block is the 50BTC reward. To solve the block header you need to create the Merkle root for those transactions, which is unique to you since the address you would be publishing to cash in the 50BTC is unique for each competing miner (unless you're feeling charitable and want to write in my address =P). If you manage to solve the header, then you add the transactions of your choice plus the one that rewards your wallet with the 50BTC, and then it goes on to the network.

Guess the only way to find you is try. But understood the concept. Like they said it should be a no brainer. Just wanted to make sure we're on the same page. +1

Seems to work for others. :)

If you were as smart as you think you are it would be really interesting to continue discussing with you. I just had to mention that I checked the variance on BTC Mine for the last 24 hours, and the equivalent number would be about +40%. A bit more than the numbers you'll see on Deepbit...

As opposed to you I'm not concerned about day to day variance since I've been mining there for over 2 weeks, and intent to stay there even longer. Day to day variance is meaningless to me. Are you going to argue I'm not getting a better reward than you for equivalent hash rate on the long term? Please try, so I can witness you slowly give up on every single horrid superstition you're randomly throwing at this thread as they keep getting debunked one after the other.

Bump because this is important.

If you're on DeepBit like I was give Eligius or Continuum a try. I like having the coins say generated in my client instead of just receiving payments from somewhere.

two questions:

why is a simple majority and not a super majority or qualified majority of some type needed?  couldn't this be changed?

why doesn't the ownership of bitcoins themselves give you some sort of veto power similar to stockholders?  After all the biggest holders of bitcoins have the LEAST incentive to devalue their own holdings.  Currently there are two components to influencing the network: running clients and hashing power.  Neither of these necessarily involve holding lots of bitcoins.  gmaxwell pointed out that you could trade bitcoins for influence in either of the two components, but I'm not sure it makes sense to have to "sell stock" to "vote".

at the very least clients with large wallets associated with them should have proportionately more power in resisting changes to the underlying protocol.

No, because it's not a formal voting process.  It's only the act of downloading a new client and running it with new rules, whichever branch dominates wins.

I want to add some thoughts...

I doubt that deepbit would harm the system but the possibility to do so could attract attention. For example I await governments to cry out loud to stop this black market money. So I really dont know how much computing power agencies in the world have and if they could overtake 50% only to harm the system but Im sure they could take control about pools if they want. I think thats possibility one.

And the second possibility would be that someone goes the sneaky way and secretly buys access or owns different pools that doesnt seem to be connected but in fact are connected through this one buyer. He could be capable of combining everything having secretly over 50%...

So while im now understand enough of the real risks of that I think there should be enough possibilities (not saying how hard to achieve) to have more than 50%...

*thumbs up*

if deepbit is not broken up or limited we may have to take action against deepbit, i would hate to have to do it but this is posing a security risk to the end user.

Yeah, write them a strongly worded letter and if they don't respond then write them an even stronger worded letter.

Or better yet, just start an advertising campaign for the small pools directed at Deepbit's miners.

See how much [Tyco] would charge to advertise other pools on his web page or put together some people willing to contribute to an advertising campaign for other pools on some major websites/google ad words.

Bump because there's not enough deepbit threads on the main page.

Two months later.

https://i.imgur.com/3LJWw.png

Bitcoin was founded on the premise that in order to use it, you wouldn’t have to trust anyone. Right now, I have to trust the deepbit OP, Tycho, to not double spend.

I consider anyone mining on deepbit a criminal.

people are watching and examining deepbit like hawks, I doubt deepbit will do anything fraudulent. Plus why would any established pool destroy their own investment by destabilizing bitcoin network? the reward is tiny vs the potential loss. What we need to watch for is if any non-established source has control of hash power over 50%.

But what if someone hacks deepbit and gains control of the pool?

It would be a short lived win, because deepbit doesn't control the pool's nodes.  As soon as the breech was noticed, and it wouldn't take all that long, the nodes' owners would just starve deepbit of it's collective resources and the takeover attempt would be useless.

But couldn't someone with control of 51% script it so they 'found' 1,000,000 blocks in the span of several seconds?

lol

No.

No.  They still have to be legitimate blocks with hashes inside of the difficulty requirement.  Otherwise, all other clients would reject the new blockchain as soon as it was presented to them, and their double-spends wouldn't propagate.

What if law enformenet confiscated Tycho's servers with the intent of controlling and corrupting the hash chain?
What if a blackhat compromised Tycho's server?
What if a criminal coerced Tycho at gun point?

Any economy has a weak point, but let's not make Bitcoin's weak point a single person. If I were that person, I wouldn't be able to sleep at night knowing the risks.

Looks like he has only about 30-40% now.

Deepbit growth it inevitable. This is the fastest mining server as of this date. I tried mining at btcmine last wednesday, stopped yesterday and until now I haven't gotten the points that I mined, still in unconfirmed points past 24 hours now.

Deepbit you can almost get your points one hour after the server refresh. No wonder they grew big in a matter of hours.

I agree.  What's the problem?  Tycho is big and more than fair.  The strength is through proxy.  If he becomes a bad actor we leave.   I think Tycho is protecting us from private money that could control everything if not for pools.

http://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chs=350x200&chd=t:0.92,3.70,22.03,5.27,2.74,55.87,1.62,0.33,5.67,1.64,0.21&cht=p&chf=bg,s,00000000&chl=ars|BitcoinPool|slush|bitcoins.lc|MtRed|other|Eligius|bitpit|btcmine|bitclockers|swepool

Wtf is this?  Where's deepbit?  Why is such a huge pool being hidden in the 'Others' slice?

Fixed now, must have been momentary.

I think I really don't get how staying on 1 pool that has a large share can cause problems.

I'll ask that someone who's more knowledgeable than me tell me the problems in an easy to understand way.I've read th ecomments here but some it seems to be hearsay (I'm not sure if it's true or just an unfounded fear that some ppl have).

My questions are:
1.How does mining on 1 pool that has 50% or more share cause problems for hte BTC currency if any?
2.If the service provided by the pool with the majority hares is very good,why should people switch to pools that have a smaller share possibly due to a possible lower standard of service for its members?
3.I don't know the share for my pool bitcoins.lc.If that's too large and it's causing problems then I won't mind moving pools.
4.If I join a pool with very few members,will I get a bigger slice of the pie with my current hash power of 400MHash/s or do I always get the amount based on my hashpower,size of pool,size of payout minus fees?

because I typically get about 0.25BTC in 14-17 hrs on bitcoins.lc so If I joined a smaller pool will I get more for the same hashpower because of the far fewer members?

Thank you.

In theory it doesn't matter which pool you join (except for the obvious difference in fees) because they all work together for a "global" solution, so let's say that there are 1000 shares/users and 1 of them has the solution, where deepbit did 500, some other pool did 250 etc. Each user still had 0.1% to find the solution.

For the 50% problem, Bitcoin is based on the fact that the largest block chain determines the "real" chain, if you have 50% or more of the generation power you could create a fake chain faster then all the other miners.

Where's the link to that pie chart?

deepbit was under ddos attack about this time.  The chart come from bitcoinwatch.  However the graphs about use the google graph maker thingy directly in the html code.