How can you be so confident that the three pool operators wouldn't decide to attack together? They may have some secret relationship. I will ask again: Why do the three top pools account for EXACTLY 51% of the total hashrate?
I mean this in the nicest way possible. But it is stupid to think big companies that depend on bitcoin would do a 51 percent attack. It would destroy their future business which if FAR FAR greater then amount they make from one 51 percent attack.
The current biggest is antpool. Do you think they would risk sales on machines to pull an attack? Not to mention pool earnings?
Second is f2pool... do you think antpool and f2pool are best friends and work together on much other then block size recently?
And bitfury is 100 percent different as they are not counting on any others outside of them for hash.
How long have you been with bitcoin? Do you mine, if so how many T? I'm trying to guage why you are so in fear of this thing that will never happen.
You are right. Sorry for my ignorance in the world of the cryptocurrencies. Answering your question: I have mined with an Antminer S1 in ~June 2014. I have also lost 0.05 BTC in a pool called 50BTC (oh, the irony), but also got ROI plus some profit by mining in two pools (eligius and another one that has closed recently - I miss this pool, but unfortunately I don't remember the name) and selling the miner to a guy from the same state that I live. I was lucky, since it's not profitable anymore. In fact, I would be paying to keep it running today, which shows that investing in miners is for the richest, who are able to invest huge amounts in ASICs that can offer a power consumption as low as <1W/Ghs. I didn't know for sure that S1s would become crap all that soon, so don't look at me badly for selling him, since I didn't know what was going to happen in the next few months. I already knew that it wouldn't be worth to turn on that miner after some time. But I didn't know that the difficulty would raise so freaking much in a short lifespan. Also, he is a rich guy, so he does not even care so much that it's not profitable. He is even in my fb friendlist. (:
I would, since I'm poor af.
