GHash.IO and double-spending against BetCoin Dice

[itod]

OK, it's obvious that Bitcoin should be trust-free, but it temporarily isn't. That's life. There should be no wars, but there are, all over the world. What's positive in this whole situation is that it is temporary. They will stop accepting new miners, and they just can't cut off people who simply will not switch from their pool no matter how unreasonable that is. Considering the insane rate GHs being added to a network, and the fact they have 55% of their hashing power from outside miners, they should drop under 40% in one or two difficulty increases, one month at the most. If they would not be under 40% a month from now, then we should be worried cause they are lying right now about being serious and aggressive in reducing their network percentage.

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[rix5]

before i have to trust ghash.io i choose to trust the government. Seriously, guys.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=407843.msg4419203#msg4419203

if they choose to ignore all the voices and go forward with aggressive expansion i choose the exit. And i know i am not the only one. Just stating 'we will not reach 51%' is not enough here. They need to stop long before that. 35% of the network is more than enough for a single entity.

[Zakryze]

OK, it's obvious that Bitcoin should be trust-free, but it temporarily isn't. That's life. There should be no wars, but there are, all over the world. What's positive in this whole situation is that it is temporary. They will stop accepting new miners, and they just can't cut off people who simply will not switch from their pool no matter how unreasonable that is. Considering the insane rate GHs being added to a network, and the fact they have 55% of their hashing power from outside miners, they should drop under 40% in one or two difficulty increases, one month at the most. If they would not be under 40% a month from now, then we should be worried cause they are lying right now about being serious and aggressive in reducing their network percentage.

Do you really think they have 55% of outside miners? what makes you so sure about this? if they can add the feature to mine with the ghashes on other pools who tells you they arent doing so with their own gear right now? Imo if people buy the overpriced hashpower nothing ensures that they didnt infiltrate other pools with their mining power already. In the end what we need is transparency and some sort of evidence that they play with open cards.
They ask their users to give out their IDs by the 4th of february... First of all we should all claim to see a valid ID of the owner of cex and himself holding it up to the camera or something like this because right now this is labcoin 2.0 to me (ftwk)

[itod]

before i have to trust ghash.io i choose to trust the government. Seriously, guys.

orly? Which government? I'm starting to suspect there's some anti-Russian tone in this argument if someone is preferring the government over GHash.

[bee7]

before i have to trust ghash.io i choose to trust the government. Seriously, guys.

orly? Which government? I'm starting to suspect there's some anti-Russian tone in this argument if someone is preferring the government over GHash.

What? Why do you link ghash.io with Russia? I am Russian and I live in Russia and I don't see the point.

[siameze]

OK, it's obvious that Bitcoin should be trust-free, but it temporarily isn't. That's life. There should be no wars, but there are, all over the world. What's positive in this whole situation is that it is temporary. They will stop accepting new miners, and they just can't cut off people who simply will not switch from their pool no matter how unreasonable that is. Considering the insane rate GHs being added to a network, and the fact they have 55% of their hashing power from outside miners, they should drop under 40% in one or two difficulty increases, one month at the most. If they would not be under 40% a month from now, then we should be worried cause they are lying right now about being serious and aggressive in reducing their network percentage.

Do you really think they have 55% of outside miners? what makes you so sure about this? if they can add the feature to mine with the ghashes on other pools who tells you they arent doing so with their own gear right now? Imo if people buy the overpriced hashpower nothing ensures that they didnt infiltrate other pools with their mining power already. In the end what we need is transparency and some sort of evidence that they play with open cards.
They ask their users to give out their IDs by the 4th of february... First of all we should all claim to see a valid ID of the owner of cex and himself holding it up to the camera or something like this because right now this is labcoin 2.0 to me (ftwk)

I agree. We will see similar mealy-mouth responses from their management in the future.

[itod]

What? Why do you link ghash.io with Russia? I am Russian and I live in Russia and I don't see the point.

I thought the geographic location of their mining data-centers and servers is in Russia, is this not the case?

[Peter R]

gmaxwell quote from above:  "for GHash.io/CEX.io: the miners are captive and cannot leave"

The cex.io price per GH/s is consistently too high to earn a bitcoin profit, yet people still pay it.  If someone were to create a similar service to cex.io but allow short-selling of GH/s, then I'm certain this would drive the price to its natural level.  Miners would then leave cex.io in favour of this new cloud-mining farm and CEX/Ghash would have less money to re-invest in new mining hardware.  

It's like they are able to grow because their customers are eager to lose money for the privilege of "cloud mining."

Do you really think that other people, who do the opposite of what you do, are just plain stupid? Have it ever occured to you maybe you don't know something they do? CEX.IO is a trading platform, not a mining pool. If you can't earn a profit there, it doesn't mean someone else can't.

I apologize if I've offended you, as I certainly did not mean to imply that people using cex.io are--as you said--"plain stupid."  The trading of GH/s is a very nice feature, and I'm sure talented traders can earn a profit.  

What I was saying is that the lack of short-selling keeps the price per GH/s higher than it otherwise would be if short-selling were possible, and that I believe people holding GH/s long-term will tend to lose BTC.  For example, if short-selling were possible, I would be eager to short-sell many GH/s contracts, ride them out till they are worth close to zero, and (I believe) earn a profit.  If shorting is indeed profitable, investors will keep doing it until the expected return from shorting is too small to be worth the risk, at which point the price per GH/s will have reached a more natural level.  

If another service similar to cex.io were to open, and allow for short-selling, I expect the price would be lower than at cex.io and cloud-hashers would leave in favour of this new service.  This would cut into the profitability of cex.io and constrain their ability to purchase additional mining hardware.  

[Pangia]

Unfortunately this is an issue that has been brought on partially by ASIC mining, as less actual devices mining with alot more hashing power means less diversity.

Would it be wise then to ensure that future alt-coins have protection against ASIC implementation to prevent what's happening to Bitcoin from happening to a future alt-coin?

[bee7]

What? Why do you link ghash.io with Russia? I am Russian and I live in Russia and I don't see the point.

I thought the geographic location of their mining data-centers and servers is in Russia, is this not the case?

Although they could have some DCs in Russia there is no proof of that. Originally the ghash.io as well as cex.io domain names have been registered by some Ukrainian people but definitely with fake address info in the WHOIS databases so unverifiable, as well as the fact that these people are actually Ukrainian residents. Later it was claimed that the business has been bought by some people in the UK and this is what we all believe now. There is no publicly available info on where they actually have all their assets.

Anyway, I can't see any 'anti-Russian tone' in the post you have cited

[edmundedgar]

Unfortunately this is an issue that has been brought on partially by ASIC mining, as less actual devices mining with alot more hashing power means less diversity.

Wou
ld it be wise then to ensure that future alt-coins have protection against ASIC implementation to prevent what's happening to Bitcoin from happening to a future alt-coin?

That might be a good thing if it could be done, and Litecoin tries to do it, but it's not clear that it can. If you make it difficult, but not impossible, to create specialist hardware that can out-compete commodity hardware then you risk making the problem worse: One person cracks it before everyone else does, and they get a monopoly until everyone catches up.

The real alternative is not to use proof-of-work at all, but making an alternative work well isn't a trivial problem.

[rix5]

before i have to trust ghash.io i choose to trust the government. Seriously, guys.

orly? Which government? I'm starting to suspect there's some anti-Russian tone in this argument if someone is preferring the government over GHash.

any government. They are at least known with their names and faces and can be held accountable to an extend for their actions. No anti-russian tone there

[boinc]

Who said NovaCoin PeerCoin?

[neutralist]

What? Why do you link ghash.io with Russia? I am Russian and I live in Russia and I don't see the point.

I thought the geographic location of their mining data-centers and servers is in Russia, is this not the case?

Later it was claimed that the business has been bought by some people in the UK and this is what we all believe now. There is no publicly available info on where they actually have all their assets.

Anyway, I can't see any 'anti-Russian tone' in the post you have cited

Probably a front for the royal family and the Rothschilds 

[Come-from-Beyond]

People just need to chill out and relax, Ghash promised not to gain 51%.

A cryptocurrency based on promise...

[mmitech]

People just need to chill out and relax, Ghash promised not to gain 51%.

A cryptocurrency based on promise...

it was sarcasm if you didn't understand  

[bee7]

People just need to chill out and relax, Ghash promised not to gain 51%.

A cryptocurrency based on promise...

The problem is that not the ghash.io. This is us, the community, who still do mine on ghas.io.

[Come-from-Beyond]

People just need to chill out and relax, Ghash promised not to gain 51%.

A cryptocurrency based on promise...

it was sarcasm if you didn't understand  

I know, the other part says so. The point is that their press release is just a BS. Everyone who read it wasted his time.

[mmitech]

People just need to chill out and relax, Ghash promised not to gain 51%.

A cryptocurrency based on promise...

it was sarcasm if you didn't understand  

I know, the other part says so. The point is that their press release is just a BS. Everyone who read it wasted his time.

I totally agree, the problem is with miners, I have the feeling that most of miners don't have a basic understanding of the protocol, and most of them cares only about how much they can mine and at what price they will sell.

[Balthazar]

People just need to chill out and relax, Ghash promised not to gain 51%.

A cryptocurrency based on promise...

I guess that only RealSolid is allowed to do so, because this approach is proprietary. So we need his blessing and perhaps his permission