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I own a few Bitcoins, so I have an incentive to contribute something and collected the most interesting posts of the Ghash discussion.
So whats the problem with Ghash having over 51%?
I doubt they would do anything malicious as well. But that's not the point. The point is that Bitcoin is trustless, yet I have to trust them.
Why do people want to use Ghash instead of other pools?
[...]
Ghash.io remains the best pool, and no other pool comes close.
To have a real long-term solution there need to be other pools that offer the same or better benefits as ghash.io:
Very low fees
Share the transaction fee income between miners (some pools keep it to themselves, which is ridiculous)
Clear stats on your hashrate and income
Automatic payout, preferably split between shareholders
API support to check your hashrate from mobile or browser plugin
Reliablilty
Total pool hashing power (to decrease variance)
Merged mining (=free extra money) preferably with automatic cash out or even automatic exchange to bitcoin
Ghash.io remains the best pool, and no other pool comes close.
To have a real long-term solution there need to be other pools that offer the same or better benefits as ghash.io:
Very low fees
Share the transaction fee income between miners (some pools keep it to themselves, which is ridiculous)
Clear stats on your hashrate and income
Automatic payout, preferably split between shareholders
API support to check your hashrate from mobile or browser plugin
Reliablilty
Total pool hashing power (to decrease variance)
Merged mining (=free extra money) preferably with automatic cash out or even automatic exchange to bitcoin
Quote from: acoindr link=http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/27js1b/ghashio_24_hours_45_again/
GHash understands marketing and presentation. They also offer the most merge mined coins (BTC,IXC,DVC,NMC). Finally they tie in a hashrate trading platform (CEX.io) allowing anyone to get in/out of mining as they please. The people behind GHash are to mining as Mark Zuckerberg is to social networking. If there wasn't a 50% concern they would have over 90% of the pooled network by now I'm sure.
Slush's Pool was the first pool, now they have less than 5%. View Slush's page here, now view GHash.io. Any questions?
Slush's Pool was the first pool, now they have less than 5%. View Slush's page here, now view GHash.io. Any questions?
Ok, but why don't people switch to p2pool?
Quote from: skilliard4 link=http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/27lu29/can_someone_make_a_more_appealing_pool_than_ghash/
Well, there's a few downsides to using p2pool.
The first is inconsistency. If you have low hashing power, it may take you forever to even find a share. For example, mining on p2pool with an old 10 GH/s ASIC isn't very reliable.
The second is lack of tracking services. While some mining pools offer all sorts of worker statistics, p2pool can't really provide much due to shares being hard to find and it being decentralized. So you'll need to use another program to monitor your miners when away, instead of just logging onto the pool website.
The last is that it can be a bit more difficult to set up than a regular pool. You need to run a full node, which takes up a lot of bandwidth and about 20 GB(and growing) of storage. So if you have limited data, it may not be for you.
There are also advantages to using p2pool:
helping decentralize the network
Because there's no central operator, there's no risk of the pool getting hacked and your balance being lost
No fees!
The first is inconsistency. If you have low hashing power, it may take you forever to even find a share. For example, mining on p2pool with an old 10 GH/s ASIC isn't very reliable.
The second is lack of tracking services. While some mining pools offer all sorts of worker statistics, p2pool can't really provide much due to shares being hard to find and it being decentralized. So you'll need to use another program to monitor your miners when away, instead of just logging onto the pool website.
The last is that it can be a bit more difficult to set up than a regular pool. You need to run a full node, which takes up a lot of bandwidth and about 20 GB(and growing) of storage. So if you have limited data, it may not be for you.
There are also advantages to using p2pool:
helping decentralize the network
Because there's no central operator, there's no risk of the pool getting hacked and your balance being lost
No fees!
Why do they offer so much more than other pools?
[...]At no point in GHash's history have they halted registrations to prevent a 51% hash rate. The only pool to ever do so was BTC Guild, and it did so at 45% of the network. And the difference there was 100% of BTC Guild's hash rate was public, no private mining farm. GHash.io continues to control a private mining farm of 40-50% of it's pool speed if not more, while trying to get more people to join their pool which has 0 economic sense behind it unless they plan on double spending or stealing from users (they're literally throwing money away to operate a public pool, spending time supporting people, and paying for servers, and gaining NOTHING from it).
I don't know if that's true, but how do they manage to upkeep their offer?
Maybe they just betting that mining isn't going to give back the full investment, so their share is the part they don't have to pay out.
Wouldn't miners change anyway, for the good of Bitcoin?
Quote from: FearManifesto link=http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/27l8id/ghashio_at_47_hashrate_for_the_last_24_hours/
[...]such nebulous incentives don't work in reality. For example, endangering long-term viability of fish stock never stopped overfishing and destroying fisheries, because it requires agreement of everybody, and it takes one bad actor to for the pact to fall apart. It's very profitable to not follow the pact to not overfish (especially if everyone else is following it), so default equilibrium is "fish as much as you can". You simply can't trust your competitors to not take advantage of you. [...]
In theory, we as Bitcoin "shareholders" should have incentive to create a solution.
This would mean creating an offer on par with that of Ghash and avertising it, so miners would have an incentive to change.
Also it seems like better documentation / an easy step guide is needed:
Quote from: prof7bit link=http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/27lu29/can_someone_make_a_more_appealing_pool_than_ghash/
p2pool documentation is horribly confusing, incomplete, unstructured and misleading, its causing misunderstandings, most people don't even get what it actually is and there is no place to go to read about it and understand it, all the websites of the public nodes are written for people who already have an intimate knowledge about the structure of the whole p2pool network and most websites trying to give a general overview also fail and are not targeted at the average miner either, they are written in a horribly convoluted unstructured style and after reading them you usually know less than before, even if you have an above average IQ.
Your posting above is yet another proof of that.
Documentation needs to improve.
Your posting above is yet another proof of that.
Documentation needs to improve.
Another solution might be a protocol change that changes the incentive.
(sry for putting out a 3rd thread about this, I hope the compilation is interesting enough)
