Moving the miners they control to other pools is pointless and only hides the problem. They can move them back at any time.

Kicking out all the other miners by denying them any rewards and then reduce the online miners to a bare minimum would probably be profitable enough.

You had some good questions, too bad he didn't answer them at all.

Good luck with that. Besides, nobody would lose their bitcoins just because somebody makes a mining monopoly, so there would be no reason to go to court. They can't change the bitcoin protocol either. They could double spend, but that would make them lose trust and ruin the point. For the users some aspects could even be improved. For instance it would make instant confirmations possible, because the monopoly owners decides what gets included in the next block.

Not if there is already an economy that depends on Bitcoin. The network and all the businesses and users that depend on it would still be there, and for anyone except the miners the difference would be minimal. Nobody throws away their fiat money or Paypal money just because it's controlled by single entities. Most people don't care about the political and ideological issues.

I think the biggest threat is a variation of the 51% attack that leads to permanent centralization. One organization can buy up enough mining equipment to have 55-60% of the mining power. It doesn't matter if it's not profitable in the long run because if you ignore all other blocks, no other miners will get any profits at all. This will force them to quit, and after a while most of the miners can be turned off. The difficulty level will go down, and the winner will get all the profits with minimal costs. If anyone tries to compete the offline miners can be turned back on to override their blocks.

This probably won't become a reality unless the Bitcoin economy gets significantly larger, though.

Making a few % profit of a tiny amount every now and then when you see that the differences are large is completely different from consistently making a large profit from a large invested amount. It's like thinking you can make a living from playing poker because you do well on the play money tables.

Judging from the response I got when I asked, they realize it's a ponzi but they just don't care.

Of course it's a ponzi. They even claim that one of the founders is silly rich, and still they are just giving away the profits to random strangers. If it was true he would use his own money.

Expedia only supports bitcoins for hotels, and only on the US site. I haven't actually ordered anything using BTCtrip because they didn't support the airline I wanted to use for a particular trip, but they've been very responsive when I asked questions on email. The fact that they've existed for more than a year and there doesn't seem to be any bad reviews makes me think it's safe to use them.

For hotels I recommend trying https://www.simplytravelonline.com/. I've used them once and had no problems. I think their map search with various filters makes it really easy to find the cheapest hotels that are not crap and not too far away from where you want to be.

Or the other pools just don't want to work for free. The only marketing that has ever worked well in bitcoin mining is having a lower price than the other pools. What you should be asking yourself is why ghash.io wants every miner to mine for them so badly that they are willing work for free right now. I can see several reasons, but not a single one that's good for Bitcoin and it's users.

Nope, that's not it either. It means that if you want to replace the block chain you either can't use too much time, or you have to set the time stamp into the future to give yourself some extra time. "Fortunately" for ghash.io they control a lot of the miners in their pool, which gives them a better probability.

It *never* happens in an open ended investment opportunity with a fairly predictable daily "profit" like this. The shares of any business that earns this much money sky rockets immediately, and the opportunity for other investors to get the same profit disappears.

1. If you can get past your wishful thinking it's really not hard to figure out what it must be.
2. Like they did in the Madoff case?

That's not how profits are calculated if you want to do it correctly. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=527395.msg7303409#msg7303409

Not until it's too late.


FACT: Just this morning ghash.io didn't find any blocks for 1.5 hours, and nobody raised an eyebrow. Later this morning they released 5 blocks in 20 minutes. They may be also be hiding their actual mining rate by releasing some blocks without telling. For instance http://blockchain.info/blocks/91.121.192.38 has only released 4 blocks, but 3 of them appeared within less than 2 hours. This strongly suggests that a lot of the unknown mining power belongs to a single entity which is frequently switching IP.

If you have 80% the rest depends on your goodwill to get any profits at all. You can just ignore the other blocks and take 100% of the profits, or delay the release of your blocks until somebody else finds one and then immediately override it by sending out two blocks. Doing this you would also be the one who decides how much it would cost to use the Bitcoin network.

How can we be sure they're following the same rules for when it's ok to commit fraud as you? Mine are that it's never ok, but I'm painfully aware that not everybody follows my rules.

For the one in Amsterdam they had just hired some woman to represent them.

Pool A would appear as Pool C if the switched IP. They could just go back to being Pool A when they're back under the threshold, or pretend being pool D, E, F and however many they need to avoid being throttled.