Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion

[seljo]

what does organofcoti say about this? i highly doubt its 100% true

Voodah, it's just "luck". They're legit and never cheated.

I sincerely hope both of you guys are right..!

I don't really enjoy this at all, and know, calling this out can generate a certain level of hatred by some.

Still, I think we need more transparency.

Trust me it's only luck I have few Ghs on BTC guild and my income today is 30% more than it is normal on this diff.

+1
Same here.

Ah this brings back memories when we had same problem with deepbit. Anyone knows why deepbit stayed on getwork and is not upgrading it just stayed as it was years ago and still mining?

If you're mining on GPU then I think it's your only choice. I still have a 6950 mining on them

I have one 5970 with bad ram or smthing... that wont crunch scrypt but mining BTC with no problems on deepbit.

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[eleuthria]

You are 100% right. I sincerely apologize to you and BTCGuild.

I would love your input, you do know what you're talking about; how healthy would you rate the network from 0 to 100?  

My only concern with the network is the current uneven distribution of hash rate in PRIVATE hands, and 0% pools.  Obviously I'm going to be biased, but BTC Guild makes a good amount of money.  I have an incentive to stay honest, work hard, and keep the pool going.  Any kind of attack from BTC Guild makes no sense because a successful attack, while potentially profitable, will kill the business.  My concern comes from pools where there is no incentive, such as ghash.io.  We already know they control a private farm in excess of 1 PH/s.  Additionally, they are offering a 0% fee pool.

That makes no sense, they are spending money to get other hash rate to work with them.  Similarly, they lose nothing if they do something that the rest of the network would consider bad.  It doesn't have to be an actual attack, it could be something as simple as refusing to vote/upgrade the next time the protocol needs a super-majority to be modified.

Like I said, I'm biased on that regard, they're competition technically.  Though it's not much of a competition when one side is producing a profit and the other is literally throwing money away.  It's up to users to make the judgment call about their motives, but it makes meuneasy to see an entity that has no incentive to stay honest to its users.


Expanding on the first bit:  My concern with private hands is the relatively low cost for an ASIC manufacturer to obtain 51% in the current environment.  There is not enough competition in manufacturers, and none of them have invested much money in mass production.

[macsga]

If you're looking for something different, then follow the lead of those canucks.

Seems they have embraced the cold and are making their trucks out of ice.

http://video.canadiantire.ca/v/1604168342/behind-the-scenes-documentary-of-the-canadian-tire-ice-truck-winter-2013/

Another way to say "cool it guys?" Pretty!

[Voodah]

You are 100% right. I sincerely apologize to you and BTCGuild.

I would love your input, you do know what you're talking about; how healthy would you rate the network from 0 to 100?  

My only concern with the network is the current uneven distribution of hash rate in PRIVATE hands, and 0% pools.  Obviously I'm going to be biased, but BTC Guild makes a good amount of money.  I have an incentive to stay honest, work hard, and keep the pool going.  Any kind of attack from BTC Guild makes no sense because a successful attack, while potentially profitable, will kill the business.  My concern comes from pools where there is no incentive, such as ghash.io.  We already know they control a private farm in excess of 1 PH/s.  Additionally, they are offering a 0% fee pool.

That makes no sense, they are spending money to get other hash rate to work with them.  Similarly, they lose nothing if they do something that the rest of the network would consider bad.  It doesn't have to be an actual attack, it could be something as simple as refusing to vote/upgrade the next time the protocol needs a super-majority to be modified.

Like I said, I'm biased on that regard, they're competition technically.  Though it's not much of a competition when one side is producing a profit and the other is literally throwing money away.  It's up to users to make the judgment call about their motives, but it makes meuneasy to see an entity that has no incentive to stay honest to its users.

Could not agree more. Thanks for clarifying things for me.

[notme]

A few things about p2pool.  First, you don't have to run a node to mine on p2pool.  You can connect to one of hundreds of public nodes.  As long as you use your address as your username, you will get paid out.  You can even fall back to other p2pool nodes with the same address and keep mining if a node goes down.  The node can have a fee, but there are plenty of low fee or free ones available.  Running your own node locally can reduce your latency and thus lower your stale shares, but you suffer the same issue with a centralized pool.

That said, the issue with p2pool is that you have to be able to get a share within the 24 hour payout window.  At the moment it takes around 44 GH/s to average 1 share/24 hours.  I believe this can be solved with tiered share-chains and m-of-n addresses, but there are some sticky issues.  Basically, 100 lower difficulty sharechains are formed where all participants on a given chain mine to the same p2pool address (the sharechain address), but they also encode their individual address in the block.  The sharechain address is an m-of-n address that requires a portion of the individual addresses in the recent chain to spend.  When the sharechain address receives a payout, sharechain participants send out their signatures for a transaction to spend the payout to the individual miners.  Of course, there may need to be some accumulation allowed so that minimum payout levels can be instituted to avoid spamming dust, which is where it gets sticky since we need to ensure they are spendable.  Bitcoin blocks currently couldn't support paying out each miner with every block (which would be the case if we had everyone on p2pool and set the payout window long enough so the smallest miner could have reasonable variance).  But it's tough because we need to ensure that the accumulated btc can be spent and micro-p2pool nodes with the keys might disappear, so finding the right m and n may be tricky.  Also, the sharechain address will have to change as the individual miner addresses change.

Like I said, it's sticky, especially with the 1MB blocksize limit.

[Voodah]

Though it's not much of a competition when one side is producing a profit and the other is literally throwing money away.  

Could you expand on this?

Are they not covering the 0% fee costs with the crazy GH's price and the fee's over at Cex.io?
Is it truly your belief, that they are not making money out of their whole scheme?

Are they not the same organization?
Is it known who the owners are?

[notme]

Though it's not much of a competition when one side is producing a profit and the other is literally throwing money away.  

Could you expand on this?

Are they not covering the 0% fee costs with the crazy GH's price and the fee's over at Cex.io?
Is it truly your belief, that they are not making money out of their whole scheme?

Are they not the same organization?
Is it known who the owners are?

Do they payout merge mined coins?  If not, perhaps they are merge mining and paying their expenses with those.

[macsga]

@Voodah &@Eleuthria:
It's not that simple as "throwing away money" IMHO. "When in doubt; follow the money". EVERYONE involved in btc business has an incentive of keeping the network going. Even if they have 1BTC or less. It's the way it's been built. So I don't think they will make anything funny. There's profit for them too. Either from their mining percentage, or from their margin via "your btc NOW" vs "possible profitability".

BTW: Great job with btcguild. Keep it up.

[mmitech]

what does organofcoti say about this? i highly doubt its 100% true

Voodah, it's just "luck". They're legit and never cheated.

I sincerely hope both of you guys are right..!

I don't really enjoy this at all, and know, calling this out can generate a certain level of hatred by some.

Still, I think we need more transparency.

I'd recommend reading up on things before coming to conclusions and pointing fingers.  What you posted is in no way unusual.  

Additionally, selfish mining doesn't apply to BTC Guild.  As posted above, Selfish Mining is GUARANTEED to noticeably increase the number or orphans on the network.  This not only makes it obvious its being done, but BTC Guild *pays for orphans* when its blocks are orphaned.  BTC Guild would actually become unprofitable if I ever attempted to do selfish mining because of that simple fact.

I know you are a trustworthy individual but no matter how honest you are and/or who is on charge of BTCguild or any other large pool (Ghash.IO) this is not how things meant to be, this is against the Bitcoin concept of decentralization and taking the trust from individuals and organizations and putting it on a distributed network....

if we will start feeling comfortable about BTCguild or any other pool getting bigger and bigger than we better cash the BTC and put the money in a Bank, at least if the bank get robbed the government will pay us back some of the loss....

[Voodah]

@Voodah &@Eleuthria:
It's not that simple as "throwing away money" IMHO. "When in doubt; follow the money". EVERYONE involved in btc business has an incentive of keeping the network going. Even if they have 1BTC or less. It's the way it's been built. So I don't think they will make anything funny. There's profit for them too. Either from their mining percentage, or from their margin via "your btc NOW" vs "possible profitability".

BTW: Great job with btcguild. Keep it up.

No. This is just wishful thinking. Today I was shown I was wrong regarding BTCGuild.

Everything else is still true.

They have already made "funny" things. Head over to the Ghash.io double-spend posts or look even further back for pool operator corruption.

Wherever there is power, some degree of corruption is to be expected. It's human nature. Do not blindly dismiss it.

[aminorex]

1. Create a bounty to get P2Pool integrated into the reference client. Make it so with a few clicks you are mining to a bitcoin address of your choosing. This will lower the bar to mine at P2Pool and more users will be more inclined to take advantage of what P2Pool has to offer.

2. Contribute additional subsidies or rewards to P2Pool miners. Perhaps bounties for certain landmarks. Set up a fund where the miners of P2Pool get donations if P2Pool hits a certain percentage of the network. The larger the percentage, the larger the reward. Distribute the rewards over a long period of time in order to keep miners at P2Pool.

Things like this could help with the network, but they cost money. As long as things are working OK as they are, no one is going to bother. They don't realize prevention is better than a cure.

I hope that in the foofurah over Voodah's rash moment the doc's prescription is not lost.  

If the bitcoin foundation can't even manage this critical infrastructure issue effectively - existential threat management - ought there not to be an alternative vehicle for our collective rational self-interest?

We, the speculators should be the most rationally self- interested and hence charitably enabling,  of all the possible interest groups and communities of interest in the cryptoverse.

[macsga]

I think that we're missing the point here. Let's say a big pool is closing down. Will BTC fail? NO! Even 6 clients worldwide are enough to make the network running. Fraud is always possible Voodah. I'm not taking it lightly. But for BTC as we know it - it's rather rare and/or stupid for someone to try and get profit out of it.

[eleuthria]

Though it's not much of a competition when one side is producing a profit and the other is literally throwing money away.  

Could you expand on this?

Are they not covering the 0% fee costs with the crazy GH's price and the fee's over at Cex.io?
Is it truly your belief, that they are not making money out of their whole scheme?

Are they not the same organization?
Is it known who the owners are?

Cex.io charges extremely high fees for "maintenance", and they also probably sell a lot of that hash rate into the order book since they definitely own more than what is on the book.  However, ghash.io also allows miners to point their own hardware at the pool at 0% fee.  They're the same company.  The "throwing money away argument" is based on that part.  They are spending time and money servicing external miners, and are not making a single cent off the time/money spent on those users.

[eleuthria]

I know you are a trustworthy individual but no matter how honest you are and/or who is on charge of BTCguild or any other large pool (Ghash.IO) this is not how things meant to be, this is against the Bitcoin concept of decentralization and taking the trust from individuals and organizations and putting it on a distributed network....

if we will start feeling comfortable about BTCguild or any other pool getting bigger and bigger than we better cash the BTC and put the money in a Bank, at least if the bank get robbed the government will pay us back some of the loss....

This argument would make sense if I was doing something to try to lure users in.  Reduced fees (or 0%), promotional events, referrals, etc.  BTC Guild's entire business is based on providing superior service, and in return it charges what I would consider a reasonable fee.  BTC Guild has been shrinking, though that's mostly due to ghash.io's private farm which is roughly 10% of the network if not a little more.  I'm not trying to claw it back in any way, and have made changes in the past to purposely push hashing power off of the pool when it was getting too large.

[ChartBuddy]

[Voodah]

Though it's not much of a competition when one side is producing a profit and the other is literally throwing money away.  

Could you expand on this?

Are they not covering the 0% fee costs with the crazy GH's price and the fee's over at Cex.io?
Is it truly your belief, that they are not making money out of their whole scheme?

Are they not the same organization?
Is it known who the owners are?

Cex.io charges extremely high fees for "maintenance", and they also probably sell a lot of that hash rate into the order book since they definitely own more than what is on the book.  However, ghash.io also allows miners to point their own hardware at the pool at 0% fee.  They're the same company.  The "throwing money away argument" is based on that part.  They are spending time and money servicing external miners, and are not making a single cent off the time/money spent on those users.

So essentially, they would be running an unprofitable unsustainable mining pool/corporation in the back, while taking profits in the form of exorbitant service prices and fees in the front. As a corollary they amass huge network share and get to hide their profits.

Would this be a fair assessment?

[justusranvier]

Haven't read all the backlog, so I'm not sure if this has been addressed or not:

There's a difference in terms of the threat posed by a pool that aggregates hashing power from many different individuals, all of whom could switch if the pool operator breaks evil, and that posed by large capacity miners who control all the hashing equipment themselves.

[Sitarow]

Though it's not much of a competition when one side is producing a profit and the other is literally throwing money away.  

Could you expand on this?

Are they not covering the 0% fee costs with the crazy GH's price and the fee's over at Cex.io?
Is it truly your belief, that they are not making money out of their whole scheme?

Are they not the same organization?
Is it known who the owners are?

Cex.io charges extremely high fees for "maintenance", and they also probably sell a lot of that hash rate into the order book since they definitely own more than what is on the book.  However, ghash.io also allows miners to point their own hardware at the pool at 0% fee.  They're the same company.  The "throwing money away argument" is based on that part.  They are spending time and money servicing external miners, and are not making a single cent off the time/money spent on those users.

The motivation perhaps could be linked to the demand for freshly mined coins.
Do you perhaps think that they have been commissioned to produce virgin coins?
Any blocks solved are kept by the pool and what is paid out to the miners are tainted coins?

[Walsoraj]

A 51 on bitcoin would almost certainly result in the dramatic rise of an altcoin. Enormous profits to be made if you buy up a bunch of alts before the attack.

[T.Stuart]

A 51 on bitcoin would almost certainly result in the dramatic rise of an altcoin. Enormous profits to be made if you buy up a bunch of alts before the attack.

Do you suggest Dogecoin for example?