Deepbit Approaching 50% Once Again

[Jarredm]

I always find these threads amusing, especially from the 'free market' types. Unregulated markets naturally tend towards monopolies.

In a free market, even with monopolies there is still the threat of competition. Let's say that Nike has a monopoly in shoes. As long as everyone is getting what they want at a reasonable price, who cares? The reason why, even with a monopoly, Nike isn't going to start charging $1,000 for a pair of low quality shoes is that they know it would entice competition. They want to keep their monopoly so they refrain from doing that because, at a reasonable price and reasonable quality, there's no incentive for competition. Hence, the mere fact that someone could enter the shoe market will prevent Nike from getting uppity.

Monopolies aren't bad unless they're enforced involuntarily which requires government action. Voluntary monopolies aren't a problem.

That's not accurate unfortunately.  That assumes that Nike will act ethically and that their only recourse to maintain their monopoly is the manipulation of their product's price and quality.  If Nike has a monopoly then nothing prevents them from acting unethically and taking other steps to prevent competition such as using their size to demand exclusive contracts for raw materials necessary to produce shoes or overpaying for those materials thereby increasing the market's barrier to entry.

This is the same way with an ultra-powerful monopolistic pool.  They can use their size and resources to prevent competition by dDosing for example.

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[jwzguy]

Where are you guys getting that nifty pie-chart? Is it auto-generated somewhere? What's our current total network power?

[NghtRppr]

What evidence do you present that the monopolies formed under a free market are balanced by an invisible potential competitor? Internet Explorer is a terrible example, as it was sued under Anti-Trust laws and the evil government forced Microsoft to change its practices to create more "fair" competition.

Please provide some kind of evidence for this claim. How exactly did the government intervene so that Internet Explorer was forced into more "fair" competition? Has Microsoft stopped bundling Internet Explorer with Windows? No, they haven't.

Since you've failed to back up your claim, I can only assume you are referring to the European Commission's settlement with Microsoft whereby Microsoft agreed to present users with a browser selection screen. The problem with that theory though is that it only applies to EU countries and only happened with Windows 7, several years after Firefox had already been chipping away at Internet Explorer. Unless you provide some new information, your claims don't hold water. Firefox is exactly the evidence you required yet, unsurprisingly, it doesn't "count".

That's not accurate unfortunately.  That assumes that Nike will act ethically and that their only recourse to maintain their monopoly is the manipulation of their product's price and quality.  If Nike has a monopoly then nothing prevents them from acting unethically and taking other steps to prevent competition such as using their size to demand exclusive contracts for raw materials necessary to produce shoes or overpaying for those materials thereby increasing the market's barrier to entry.

This is the same way with an ultra-powerful monopolistic pool.  They can use their size and resources to prevent competition by dDosing for example.

The same argument applies to the raw materials monopolies. You are just welcoming competition by not selling to whoever bids the highest.

[supa]

Where are you guys getting that nifty pie-chart? Is it auto-generated somewhere? What's our current total network power?

Pay no attention to that chart.

This is the real chart:

[tripper22]

Where are you guys getting that nifty pie-chart? Is it auto-generated somewhere? What's our current total network power?

http://bitcoinwatch.com/

[TurdHurdur]

Wouldn't you want to be on the winning side though...?

[supa]

deepbit offers the best support and best service, if the deepbit pool can be the nemesis of BTC ok whit me, design better next time, we all here apply Darwinism to $/€ and we should apply that to BTC to

This is the most brilliant thing I've read in a long time!

Biological Darwinism?  Survival of the fittest organism?

You do realize that deepbit is dependent on the bitcoin network, right?  In other words, it can be considered a biological parasite or even a natural predator.

If you, as a supporter of that parasite or predator, kill the host organism..... you're equally dead.  There are no more shmoo to eat.  The entire ecosystem collapses into nothing.

Where's that guy I called naive?  He *has* to read this...

[supa]

i missed my point you dint get this part

design better next time, we all here apply Darwinism to $/€ and we should apply that to BTC to

Yes, you did miss your point.

Unless I'm misunderstanding, your opinion is simply "eff the system as long as I get some cash out of it."

And for the record, you can't blindly say we're all "economic Darwinists."  I certainly do not rob little children, homeless people or the elderly for their cash or possessions and say "pwnt for lulz!  Darwin bishes!"

[IlbiStarz]

Getting pretty close... :O

[Maged]

I always find these threads amusing, especially from the 'free market' types. Unregulated markets naturally tend towards monopolies.

In a free market, even with monopolies there is still the threat of competition. Let's say that Nike has a monopoly in shoes. As long as everyone is getting what they want at a reasonable price, who cares? The reason why, even with a monopoly, Nike isn't going to start charging $1,000 for a pair of low quality shoes is that they know it would entice competition. They want to keep their monopoly so they refrain from doing that because, at a reasonable price and reasonable quality, there's no incentive for competition. Hence, the mere fact that someone could enter the shoe market will prevent Nike from getting uppity.

Monopolies aren't bad unless they're enforced involuntarily which requires government action. Voluntary monopolies aren't a problem.

That's not accurate unfortunately.  That assumes that Nike will act ethically and that their only recourse to maintain their monopoly is the manipulation of their product's price and quality.  If Nike has a monopoly then nothing prevents them from acting unethically and taking other steps to prevent competition such as using their size to demand exclusive contracts for raw materials necessary to produce shoes or overpaying for those materials thereby increasing the market's barrier to entry.

This is the same way with an ultra-powerful monopolistic pool.  They can use their size and resources to prevent competition by dDosing for example.

DDoSing? Man, you're thinking small. A pool that has 51% of the hashing power, besides everything else mentioned here, can also simply ignore blocks made by anyone else, effectively making their pool the ONLY way to mine. And this is the scariest attack their is, since unlike double-spending which is short-term, this would cause long-term problems if a pool was able to maintain their majority hashing power long enough to stop people from mining for nothing in other pools.

[NghtRppr]

DDoSing? Man, you're thinking small. A pool that has 51% of the hashing power, besides everything else mentioned here, can also simply ignore blocks made by anyone else, effectively making their pool the ONLY way to mine. And this is the scariest attack their is, since unlike double-spending which is short-term, this would cause long-term problems if a pool was able to maintain their majority hashing power long enough to stop people from mining for nothing in other pools.

The reason why people join pools is to make money. If you shake confidence in BTC, it will become worthless. Why would any pool do this? You can say that the pool operator might start doing it but miners would leave in droves.

[Maged]

DDoSing? Man, you're thinking small. A pool that has 51% of the hashing power, besides everything else mentioned here, can also simply ignore blocks made by anyone else, effectively making their pool the ONLY way to mine. And this is the scariest attack their is, since unlike double-spending which is short-term, this would cause long-term problems if a pool was able to maintain their majority hashing power long enough to stop people from mining for nothing in other pools.

The reason why people join pools is to make money. If you shake confidence in BTC, it will become worthless. Why would any pool do this? You can say that the pool operator might start doing it but miners would leave in droves.

The question is, would it really shake confidence enough? The miners won't mind - other than the initial shock on the exchanges, they'll be making MORE money since the difficulty would go down to whatever the single pool is putting out, not what the whole network is outputting. If the attack can be held long enough, it will be impossible to reverse without shutting down the pool through some other means, thanks to the 50% requirement needed from the rest of the network just to regain control.

In fact, this attack could happen right now in a much harder to detect manor. The major pools could silently collude to slightly increase the amount of invalid blocks other miners create, causing the affected miners to move to their pool, which has fewer invalid blocks.

[bullox]

DDoSing? Man, you're thinking small. A pool that has 51% of the hashing power, besides everything else mentioned here, can also simply ignore blocks made by anyone else, effectively making their pool the ONLY way to mine. And this is the scariest attack their is, since unlike double-spending which is short-term, this would cause long-term problems if a pool was able to maintain their majority hashing power long enough to stop people from mining for nothing in other pools.

The reason why people join pools is to make money. If you shake confidence in BTC, it will become worthless. Why would any pool do this? You can say that the pool operator might start doing it but miners would leave in droves.

The question is, would it really shake confidence enough? The miners won't mind - other than the initial shock on the exchanges, they'll be making MORE money since the difficulty would go down to whatever the single pool is putting out, not what the whole network is outputting. If the attack can be held long enough, it will be impossible to reverse without shutting down the pool through some other means, thanks to the 50% requirement needed from the rest of the network just to regain control.

THIS x1000

[rainsford]

...
on the other side we all see the pie chart and you should ask, why we get that? well because the design of the rewards is stupid (/clap devs) humans are impatient that is why 80% of all hashing powers is a pools and no solo mining, ppl want results and they want to see that  bitcoin counter move and move right after the install, the current system is just stupid, just go to http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/old_calculator.php put 300 that is the hash rate for a 5850 that anyone can have what you get is 21 BTC per month so you need almost 2,5 months of solo mining just to get a damn single block and a reward of 50 BTC that the only reason why ppl dont mine solo, you dont see results right after you start mining, want more ppl out of pools decrease the reward by 1000 times and also the difficulty

deepbit give us our sugar candy every hour while other pools or solo mining dont

That's pretty much what I was thinking after reading your first post.  Large pools are a natural result of how Bitcoin is designed, and for the individual miner, the best case would be taking part in a pool that has 100% of the hashing power.

Unfortunately the problem is only going to get worse.  As more and more hashing power is added, and as bitcoins go up in real value, the lump sum value of solving a block will go way up while the chance of doing so will go way down.  In the very, very long term it might average out, but nobody is going to be willing to wait that long.  And I'm not really sure it's reasonable to expect them to, to be honest.

From a variance standpoint, Bitcoin's design makes the largest pools the most attractive.  Which is bad for the security of the currency, and unfortunately an unavoidable result of how Bitcoin works.  You can trust that people will "do the right thing" and move to smaller pools, or you can trust the pool operators not to abuse their power, but the whole point of Bitcoin was to avoid having to place that kind of trust in individuals.

[anisoptera]

You can trust that people will "do the right thing" and move to smaller pools, or you can trust the pool operators not to abuse their power, but the whole point of Bitcoin was to avoid having to place that kind of trust in individuals.

No, the whole point of Bitcoin was to put the power to choose who to trust, or not, into the hands of individuals, and the way that's done is by voting with hash power. If you trust Tycho and think he's offering a fair deal, you hash for him. If you trust some other pool operator instead, you hash for them. If you want to go it alone, that's an option with its own risks and rewards; one of the rewards might be the ability to selectively prioritize your own transactions, or other such things.

The point is, he doesn't really control that power. The people giving it to him are engaged in an implicit contract that he's offering, and if he violates the terms of that contract, some people will stop trusting him.

Interestingly, most of you are worried about the fact that he might double spend, and instead missing the enormous cashout potential any large pool operator has.

Think about how big a block reward is in terms of USD right now. One block is worth $750 USD. Just cashing out by stealing all the generated reward a pool operator has control of, until everyone wises up and leaves, would be enormous.

You are already trusting that they aren't going to do this to you. Eventually enough people would leave the pool if he did something naughty that he would lose his power. No matter what that naughty thing is.

[Lupus_Yonderboy]

For the kids who don't remember the browser wars, the first antitrust case against Microsoft was in 1998: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft . That case is the only reason that Apple is still a company, that Linux wasn't throttled early on, oh and it is also the reason your precious Firefox was able to be developed. MS was forced to open up their APIs by the resulting judgement from that case (amongst several other things). US V. Microsoft changed a lot of things in the computing world. But please, don't let facts stand in the way of your preconceived notions.

Right now there is a significant barrier to entry for any solo miner:the difficulty. Again, miners will migrate to the larger pools because those are the ones going to be paying more often, and soon the difficulty level will get so high that only the largest pools will solve multiple blocks per day.

Why attack the chain if you own most of the network? Simply sit back and rake in the fees from the miners. Far more profitable in the long term. Seriously, attacking the block chain is like killing the golden goose. A pool operator who works their way up to owning most of the network is probably not going to mess with the block chain, that could damage the exchange prices drastically (possibly permanently), and make all their time, effort and trouble worthless. Far better to let everything run as normal, with 2-3% of the network's mined coins each day going to that operator's wallet.dat

[shakaru]

His name was [Tycho]...(chants repeating)

[gsan]

From a variance standpoint, Bitcoin's design makes the largest pools the most attractive.  Which is bad for the security of the currency, and unfortunately an unavoidable result of how Bitcoin works.  You can trust that people will "do the right thing" and move to smaller pools, or you can trust the pool operators not to abuse their power, but the whole point of Bitcoin was to avoid having to place that kind of trust in individuals.

Well, the individual miner is just in for profit and has nothing to gain from the pool's ability to disrupt the functionality of the network, so we could safely assume that s/he has an incentive to take away this ability from the pool. So, assuming that we have a mining system that does this with few enough disadvantages, almost everyone with significant stakes will switch. If this is possible, I wouldn't call the current problem an unavoidable result of how Bitcoin works.

Here is one approach: https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=9137

Another could be creating a more distributed mining environment. For instance, we could embed an optional standardized pool functionality within mining software, that could be turned on at the user's will. Miners could constantly switch nodes that they get work. In this case though, a trust system or a sophisticated distributed accounting system would be needed.

[rainsford]

You can trust that people will "do the right thing" and move to smaller pools, or you can trust the pool operators not to abuse their power, but the whole point of Bitcoin was to avoid having to place that kind of trust in individuals.

No, the whole point of Bitcoin was to put the power to choose who to trust, or not, into the hands of individuals, and the way that's done is by voting with hash power. If you trust Tycho and think he's offering a fair deal, you hash for him. If you trust some other pool operator instead, you hash for them. If you want to go it alone, that's an option with its own risks and rewards; one of the rewards might be the ability to selectively prioritize your own transactions, or other such things.

The point is, he doesn't really control that power. The people giving it to him are engaged in an implicit contract that he's offering, and if he violates the terms of that contract, some people will stop trusting him.

Interestingly, most of you are worried about the fact that he might double spend, and instead missing the enormous cashout potential any large pool operator has.

Think about how big a block reward is in terms of USD right now. One block is worth $750 USD. Just cashing out by stealing all the generated reward a pool operator has control of, until everyone wises up and leaves, would be enormous.

You are already trusting that they aren't going to do this to you. Eventually enough people would leave the pool if he did something naughty that he would lose his power. No matter what that naughty thing is.

That's a good point.  I was thinking in terms of centralized power, which I was thinking Bitcoin was designed to avoid.  But although deepbit has a lot of power, deepbit doesn't really control it, as you pointed out.  Anything bad going on, and it's very simple for everyone who mines in the deepbit pool to switch to another pool.  It's a democracy of sorts, really, with the amount of control a pool operator has being directly tied to how much trust miners have in them.  And given the relatively low cost to switching pools (as long as you cash out fairly often), a lack of trust can translate into a lack of power VERY quickly.  Which is in contrast to the central control of most currency.

Thanks for the insight, I really hadn't thought about it that way.

[supa]

For the kids who don't remember the browser wars, the first antitrust case against Microsoft was in 1998: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft . That case is the only reason that Apple is still a company, that Linux wasn't throttled early on, oh and it is also the reason your precious Firefox was able to be developed. MS was forced to open up their APIs by the resulting judgement from that case (amongst several other things). US V. Microsoft changed a lot of things in the computing world. But please, don't let facts stand in the way of your preconceived notions.

And for this hours public service announcement....

This is completely wrong.  Your memory must be fuzzy.

Not only did it not have anything to do with Apple and Linux development, but it wasn't really a factor.  Deep integration of IE on Windows based systems has nothing to do with Redhat going out of business and the Linux kernel being forgotten.

There's a movie on Netflix you can watch for some actual interviews, opinions and facts.  I think it was called 'Revolution OS.'