The possibility of your scenario is so slight that it's not even funny.

In the even that it did happen, the price will drop, mining won't be profitable and everyone that's only in it for the money would get out.

The network would recover and rebuild, a little more wiser.

I find myself absolutely astounded that you think that the majority of people on deepbit have logged into the forums and read this as well as the many other posts like it and have a clue what it means.

There are instructions all over the net by now that tell people how to download a client and connect it. The ones who are smart enough to figure it out do so, the ones who aren't fail and forget about it. Many of them will probably never find their way to the forums.


And this is bordering on criminal in most western nations.

That means every bitcoin client would need a lot more connections to the network and/or have built in long polling to make sure they are working on the current block.

Depending on how many workers/clients are connected, it could mean a lot of storage and processing.

I bought all of my cards used on ebay and locally. So far the worst that happened is a fan died and I had to buy an aftermarket cooler.

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.

Everyone gets all information from the network. You would have to modify the bitcoin protocol to limit someone from getting all information. It is a reactive response and against the ideals of the system.

The thread does not solve any problem, it proposes an alternative and has nothing tangible to show yet. It was written when there were only a few other pools than deepbit. There are more alternatives now, there are 6-7 other pools and growing every week. It does not solve the fact that there are other pools and people aren't using them.

A better use of time would be implementing this: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=7622.0 At least then if something showed up on the network that looked like the attacks that everyone is so worried might possibly happen then there would be verifiable proof and reason for those who pay attention to the forums to move somewhere else and make deepbit smaller.

To do that you would have to modify the protocol. Go ahead and write a patch to do that. It won't be accepted into the official bitcoin client and I won't download any client that has that in it.

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

We're well into the phase of people setting up miners for friends and family and just letting it run or non detail interested people following instructions with deepbit as the pool example to set up. As long as either can stand the noise, heat, or extra electricity usage they will just let it run. Some might even be watching to make sure they're getting someone out of it. Either way, they're most likely not reading all the doomsday prophecies here.

Doesn't boggle me a bit.

Sure, and you pay a 7% fee for that privilege.

Yep, bought an after market cooler. Now it's quieter and runs cooler though it's bigger than the normal ones and takes up more space than 2 slots.

It will always be easy for pool operators that make up >=50% hashing power to collude.
You will never know whether pool operators are colluding. Which ones can you trust? Best not to use any of them.
Yes, they are out to get you.  

Control of the pool doesn't mean control of the hashing power.

If only there were instructions somewhere about how to set it up, forums to ask questions in case you get stuck, and search engines to learn how to use it.  

Which can apparently be had on the Silk Road site, and apparently now everyone know about it. Oh yeah, and bitcoin munchies. All of which can be purchased from mining bitcoins.

Don't regret them, but always learn from them.

Seeing as I am not an experienced investor and have little free money it was easier for me to justify buying hardware so if the venture didn't go anywhere I at least had equity in the hardware that I could get back.

Now that I can mine some coins and use them to gain experience investing in the market perhaps next time I'll put $500 into the market instead of hardware. Of course the market will be different and probably won't be as insanely profitable as Bitcoin is right now.

I have reinvested along the way to build out my mining ops. The other day I added it up and I have mined about 650 BTC. If only I had held onto them forever BTC wil go to US$100,000/BTC and I could have been a multimillionaire. Seriously? I just got past breaking even on my reinvestment and if the something catastrophic happened to the network, the price plummeted, or I just got tired of the noise and heat I have a really kick ass machine and some extra money in my pocket from selling a few video cards, even at a bit of a loss.

Now I can use the BTC I make to buy some Bitcoin T-shirts, Alpaca Socks, Play Blackjack, and buy munchies and practice currency trading/investing after paying for electricity. I'm happy.

5850's do better with SDK 2.1 and -k poclbm. 300MH/s @ 850 is a pretty good speed.

The right config depends on what cards your are using.

I watched the market for a good while overnight.

I agree that there are probably a few very knowledgeable investors, if not "serious brokers" in the market.

When BTC/USD was making it's way up from about the $5-7.50 range there were a couple huge run ups then drop offs for a couple days in a row, then level off for a few days then it would happen again.  While it's not a massive market it still takes some serious cash to make some of the swings that were happening. I watched the charts while it was happening and after and there were very noticeable M, V, and W type patterns where the price was swinging wildly. Someone came in and bought up a huge volume of BTC, waited for the price to skyrocket up sometimes climbing $1 or more, then dumping the coins and it came crashing back down. It's pretty hard not to see market manipulation when that happens.

I watched it last night, and luckily took a little bit of advantage of it. I was in the process of selling coins when I saw the run up. I sold at 13.75 when it peaked at 13.8 then pretty quickly declined to 12.5. I bought a small bit again at 12.75 and watched it float between 12.50 and 12.75 for about 10 minutes worried it wasn't going to go back up when the price went from about 12.75 to 13.44 instantly and watched the rest of the market follow all the way up to where I sold at 13.8.

I don't think there's any other market condition that can explain buying enough volume to jump the price $0.70 other than a person or persons colluding to do so. It's pretty much an emerging currency market and because it's so small it's easy to manipulate.

You can deny that it's happening or you can recognize it for what it is and take advantage of it.