don't mine at BTCGuild

[VeeMiner]

As I'm speaking BTCGuild has 43 percent od the network. This is not healthy for the Bitcoin ecosystem at all. Please don't mine there

[eleuthria]

As I'm speaking BTCGuild has 43 percent od the network. This is not healthy for the Bitcoin ecosystem at all. Please don't mine there

33% of network hash rate: http://blockorigin.pfoe.be/top.php

Using a 24 hour graph from blockchain.info is completely useless.  BTC Guild's luck has been +50% for the last 16 hours, completely skewing blockchain.info's 24 hour charts.

[zerokwel]

I am sure I see one of these threads every few weeks now and the same answers

[jarhed]

I'll mine not at >85%.

Edit
or even 95%

Edit
screw it, BTCGuild owns the world.

[Trongersoll]

This is like the boy who cried "Wolf". even if they were at 51%, they wouldn't do anything bad. Besides, they would have to maintain that level for a while to be a threat. Briefly hitting it means nothing.

Mine where you like, for the reasons you like, it is a free world.

[crazyates]

This is like the boy who cried "Wolf". even if they were at 51%, they wouldn't do anything bad. Besides, they would have to maintain that level for a while to be a threat. Briefly hitting it means nothing.

Mine where you like, for the reasons you like, it is a free world.

I actually believe it's the opposite. It doesn't matter if they do own 51% of the network or not.

IIRC, a double spend attack would require a malicious pool op to get 6 blocks in a row. You don't actually need 51% of the network, its just that 51% or more of the network guarantees a 100% success. Even 35% of the network (with some good luck) can do a double spend. This is where BTCGuild is at right now.

[mootinator]

This is like the boy who cried "Wolf". even if they were at 51%, they wouldn't do anything bad. Besides, they would have to maintain that level for a while to be a threat. Briefly hitting it means nothing.

Mine where you like, for the reasons you like, it is a free world.

I actually believe it's the opposite. It doesn't matter if they do own 51% of the network or not.

IIRC, a double spend attack would require a malicious pool op to get 6 blocks in a row. You don't actually need 51% of the network, its just that 51% or more of the network guarantees a 100% success. Even 35% of the network (with some good luck) can do a double spend. This is where BTCGuild is at right now.

And yet if eleuthria were demonstrably trying to do that everyone would drop BTCGuild like a rock and it would never get 6 successive blocks because pool.

You're a pool operator making some amount probably significantly > 1% of all bitcoins mined in fees do you:

1. Do something that effectively makes all that bitcoin worthless
2. Keep raking it in

[01BTC10]

Remind me of: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=12370.0 

[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.

[VeeMiner]

If anyone tells me that the current hashrate spread is healthy then I don't think we're talking about same system. I don't have anything against Eulethria and I would never accuse him of doing anything wrong. However miners should be smart enough to spread the hashrate more...

[Xian01]

Resistance is futile.

[crazyates]

Remind me of: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=12370.0 

Bwahaha! I remember those days. We've come so far, eh? 

[mootinator]

If anyone tells me that the current hashrate spread is healthy then I don't think we're talking about same system. I don't have anything against Eulethria and I would never accuse him of doing anything wrong. However miners should be smart enough to spread the hashrate more...

Why exactly is it upon miners to spread the hashrate more?

eleuthria has a nice system going: Reasonable commissions, nice UI. Running a successful pool can be a lucrative business, but apparently only a handful of people are actually doing a decent job of differentiating their product from others'.

[VeeMiner]

They do have high hashrate. But they have responsible owner and only 37% of the network. Still, i would advice people to mine at pools like bitminter who have really little hashrates

that's what I'm trying to achieve here. The hashrate should spread more. Slush, 50BTC, Eligius, EclipseMC, Bitminter are all good and responsible pools

[Akka]

The hashrate should spread more. Slush, 50BTC, Eligius, EclipseMC, Bitminter are all good and responsible pools

Or use a real decentralized solution like P2Pool. Even if 100% would mine there, the network would be perfectly decentralized.
 
Really, it saddens me, that despite claiming different, most miners seem to not care about the Network and can't even live with a bit of variance.

[neutralist]

FUD

There are reasons why people with solo-mining capabilities are using BTCGuild. Simple interface, easy to setup.

[Isokivi]

[eleuthria]

I just wish that BTCGuild can shut down their getwork to reduce some hashrates. Its bad for bitcoin economy.

Getwork dies on BTC Guild on October 14th.  But it won't make much impact, it's currently ~1% of the total pool hashrate.

[ZetaOS]

Bitminter is the shit 

[ZetaOS]

Who is MegaBigPower?
http://www.btcguild.com/index.php?page=rankings&section=teams