Too Many People on BTCGuild!!!

[BRADLEYPLOOF]

Holy Crap,
BTCGuild is solving blocks back to back...perhaps spread some of the hashing power to other pools so we don't get to 51% on a single pool...try slush's pool or something...jeez

[1715629109]

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[eleuthria]

Holy Crap,
BTCGuild is solving blocks back to back...perhaps spread some of the hashing power to other pools so we don't get to 51% on a single pool...try slush's pool or something...jeez

We're 31% of the network.  Not even remotely close to 51% especially with ASICMINER + GHash.io being part of the network that will never join a pool.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=168108.0 Don't worry about that.

And those precautions will be extended/altered if it ever happens again, since one of those has already happened due to the last time the pool got too big.

[Stephen Gornick]

spread some of the hashing power to other pools so we don't get to 51% on a single pool

That's right .... don't let that happen or we'll have human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!


Even if they hit 51%, they would need to intentionally use that power to do double spends against others or reject blocks by other miners to cause harm.    If they did that, that would be the end of BTCGuild.

You are right that over time, we should not have a single pool solving half the blocks.  But don't think that a single pool like BTCGuild hitting 51% means it is lights-out for Bitcoin.

[demonmaestro]

BTCGuild has hit 51% before. Although Yes it is solving more blocks than most. Don't let that be a negative strike in your book. The network is too diverse to really make anything bad.

[xstr8guy]

I usually root for the underdog and mine with Bitminter with occasional visits to BTCGuild and Slush's Pool.  But I've recently added some serious hashing power... well, serious for me anyways.  And I just can't take the 12-24 hour periods with zero luck any longer.  It just hurts too much!

So I've joined the dark side (BTCGuild) full time, lol.  And I have to admit 184% luck (currently) feels real nice.  Yeah, I know, luck evens out over time.  But it just feels like I'm losing too much to stick around A small pool.  But I'll happily return to BitMinter if they ever start to attract more miners. 

[HellDiverUK]

I was mining on P2Pool for a while, running my own node.  But, 3+ days to solve a block was horrendous.  I'm mining on BTCGuild again.  Eligius is my backup pool.  Have to try and get ROI somehow...

[RoadTrain]

I usually root for the underdog and mine with Bitminter with occasional visits to BTCGuild and Slush's Pool.  But I've recently added some serious hashing power... well, serious for me anyways.  And I just can't take the 12-24 hour periods with zero luck any longer.  It just hurts too much!

So I've joined the dark side (BTCGuild) full time, lol.  And I have to admit 184% luck (currently) feels real nice.  Yeah, I know, luck evens out over time.  But it just feels like I'm losing too much to stick around A small pool.  But I'll happily return to BitMinter if they ever start to attract more miners. 

You mean variance, not luck, do you? Because luck doesn't depend on pool or hashrate, but variance does.
If you're that feared of variance you'd better mine of some PPS/CRBPPS/RSMPPS pool like 50btc, eligius, itzod.
Just saying

[xstr8guy]

I usually root for the underdog and mine with Bitminter with occasional visits to BTCGuild and Slush's Pool.  But I've recently added some serious hashing power... well, serious for me anyways.  And I just can't take the 12-24 hour periods with zero luck any longer.  It just hurts too much!

So I've joined the dark side (BTCGuild) full time, lol.  And I have to admit 184% luck (currently) feels real nice.  Yeah, I know, luck evens out over time.  But it just feels like I'm losing too much to stick around A small pool.  But I'll happily return to BitMinter if they ever start to attract more miners. 

You mean variance, not luck, do you? Because luck doesn't depend on pool or hashrate, but variance does.
If you're that feared of variance you'd better mine of some PPS/CRBPPS/RSMPPS pool like 50btc, eligius, itzod.
Just saying

Variance it is!  Thanks for the education. 

[eleuthria]

BTCGuild has hit 51% before. Although Yes it is solving more blocks than most. Don't let that be a negative strike in your book. The network is too diverse to really make anything bad.

We've never hit 51% of *actual* network hash rate, but with good luck streaks we had 24-hour periods where we found more than 51% of the blocks.  It's not exactly the same.

The peak was around 43-45% of network hash rate, which is when the pool increased the PPS rate to encourage users of PPS to look for another pool, and it did help.  The biggest help was obviously ASICMINER going solo.  At the time they were ~35% of the pool's speed, so by leaving the dropped the pool down to ~25-30% of network hash rate.

[BRADLEYPLOOF]

I guess I'm just sad because at 2.5 GH/s I can make .02 BTC a day on Slush's pool assuming that we can get a block.  The pps plan and the pplns plan on btcguild make it not worth my time because of all the users and 350 TH/s has rate...that's why I need to use a smaller pool...but in doing so I don't get the option of getting as many blocks, although I guess if I look at, I probably would get the same amount either way.

If I get .001 BTC per block from slush's pool (no matter how many hours it takes to find a block) or if I get .000003 BTC every block from BTC Guild and they find 1000x as many blocks a day then it evens out...

*Note, I know my math is wrong, it's merely an explanatory tool...

[BitBlitz]

BTCGuild has hit 51% before. Although Yes it is solving more blocks than most. Don't let that be a negative strike in your book. The network is too diverse to really make anything bad.

We've never hit 51% of *actual* network hash rate, but with good luck streaks we had 24-hour periods where we found more than 51% of the blocks.  It's not exactly the same.

The peak was around 43-45% of network hash rate, which is when the pool increased the PPS rate to encourage users of PPS to look for another pool, and it did help.  The biggest help was obviously ASICMINER going solo.  At the time they were ~35% of the pool's speed, so by leaving the dropped the pool down to ~25-30% of network hash rate.

Well, if the sample size is just one block--
OMG! OMG! BTCGuild is 100% of the network many times a day!  Panic! Panic!!!


 

[eleuthria]

I guess I'm just sad because at 2.5 GH/s I can make .02 BTC a day on Slush's pool assuming that we can get a block.  The pps plan and the pplns plan on btcguild make it not worth my time because of all the users and 350 TH/s has rate...that's why I need to use a smaller pool...but in doing so I don't get the option of getting as many blocks, although I guess if I look at, I probably would get the same amount either way.

If I get .001 BTC per block from slush's pool (no matter how many hours it takes to find a block) or if I get .000003 BTC every block from BTC Guild and they find 1000x as many blocks a day then it evens out...

*Note, I know my math is wrong, it's merely an explanatory tool...

This is really the entire concept behind pooled mining.  Solo mining is a huge payout but extremely rare.  Small pool mining is larger payouts but uncommon.  Large pool mining is smaller payouts but constant.

In the end they all end up roughly the same (solo mining being the absolute best but also the biggest gamble).

[mechs]

These numbers are true, there is one thing to keep in mind:  Any attempt to do so *is* visible to miners.  The second a pool tries to start a fork and reverse a transaction, miners can see the prevblockhash on the pool no longer matches the main bitcoin network.  While this isn't unusual in the case of an orphan race, the only time it has ever happened for more than 2 blocks in a row that I can recall was when we had a hardfork starting.

It's visible only in a purely abstract way. Deepbit was frequently "eating its own tail" due to running multiple bitcoin daemons which would end up on competing forks and then load balancing miners between them (if it doesn't do this anymore its only because it doesn't solve enough blocks).

Not a single person in the world noticed this until Luke-Jr, bless his occasionally trolly heart, added code to BFGMiner to refuse to mine when a pool appeared to be forking itself.  But not many people run that code.

Moreover, it's only a very partial solution:  Say the network is on block A,  you don't include the transaction you want to conflict in A. Then then another miner solves A and the network moves on to A+1 but you stay on A. Eventually you solve A'+1+1+1 ... and with some luck reverse the transaction.  Miners never see any self-forking, and so the protection in BFGminer cannot help.

Performing the attack in this way simply constrains when you can start the attack (only right after another pool found a block), it does not reduce the success rate.

Additionally, an unsuccessful attempt would be completely apparent to miner's because their earnings would plummet [unless the pool continued to pay miners for the fork blocks].  Since BTC Guild's earnings can be audited down to the block hashes that generated payouts, this would be obviously false due to the blocks that were paid not existing on the blockchain.

A number of years ago your pool delivered earning of something like 40% of expectations for months. A number of people were convinced that you were a thief because of it (that something was subtly broken, or there was some witholding attack seems like a more likely explanation, in my view), but that hasn't inhibited you from having the largest pool by far.

I cannot believe that many people would notice or care about a decline in revenue on the timescale of a single day or two.

Maybe they would. But thats a big maybe to stake the future of Bitcoin on, especially with people trying to open up new markets that allow them to take short positions. A substantial successful attack would dramatically undermine confidence in Bitcoin:  The existence of major hashpower consolations already defeats the security assumptions, but its a theoretical weakness and until an attack happens many don't believe what incredibly shaky ground we are on here.

BTC Guild is gaining on % of the network again, and I've stated in the past I think this is something that will always happen.  A zero-sum method of earning Bitcoins will always lead to natural monopolies as people prefer to get a steady income over a lottery.

Control over mining is orthogonal with pooling payments.  There is no reason that a pool couldn't simply hand out coinbase transactions to miners and credit them for any remotely sane looking shares that includes the requested coinbase transaction.   The pool would then only be a consolidation of miners payments and would have no risk for consolidating control of the blockchain consensus. Miners would become miners again, and not just people selling computing services for coin.

The risk that miners would intentionally have some junk transactions that get blocks orphaned would be strictly less than the block withholding risk which cannot be eliminated, as you could still ask miners to occasionally send whole blocks.

Had Satoshi though of this in 2010 I believe we would have a very different world today.

[OgNasty]

Mine P2Pool.  Help test our new node at NastyFans.org:9332.  Just use your bitcoin address for your username.

[mechs]

Mine P2Pool.  Help test our new node at NastyFans.org:9332.  Just use your bitcoin address for your username.

Excuse my ignorance. but why is P2Pool different from the others?

[OgNasty]

Mine P2Pool.  Help test our new node at NastyFans.org:9332.  Just use your bitcoin address for your username.

Excuse my ignorance. but why is P2Pool different from the others?

It is a decentralized mining pool.

[balanghai]

They should scatter a bit. Or there would be a great network risk if ever shady things happen.

[junshong]

Gonna move 90% of my funds to Pyramining now. Hope they can deploy some ASIC ASAP.