We never have and never will participate in any 51% attack or double spend against Bitcoin.
It's important and valuable that you've responded to the community's concerns - however personally I feel like much of the potential weight of your statement is rendered moot by the fact that you make the above statement which is partially false.
It can be interpreted as true, if we are to understand that "We" means "Our organization as directed by our management"
Yet, double spends were carried out using your pool by insiders with the explanation being that these were rouge employees not acting under the direction of management or the organization as a whole.
And therein lies the rub.
While it does not take a master logician to deduce that it would be far from organizational best interests to attempt a double spend or other exploit against the network based on a majority hashrate, the fact remains that
bad actors inside your organization have done exactly that in the past.Therefore, regardless of how benevolent a pool operator is deemed to be, having that much power in one place is inherently dangerous. Such logic is commonplace. No one man acting of his own congress generally has the ability to launch a nuclear weapon, for example.
The Nakamoto whitepaper specifically identifies Bitcoin as a trustless system. That's the beauty of it. Everything is independently verifiable. But, as we're all very aware, enough power in one place and all of a sudden trust is a very real part of it. It's not, per se, that we don't want to trust you - It's that by the nature of the ecosystem into which we have all taken part in, we don't want to have to trust you. Or anyone for that matter.
The mining community at large has long been aware of this, and I'm glad to hear that you're open to discussion. Lets keep it a trustless system. Show us your commitment to preserving the ecosystem by the metaphorical blockchain of your next steps.
I think getting on board with the GBT protocol would be simply gigantic in demonstrating this commitment. I know Luke-jr agrees with me, and I surmise many others do as well.
There also may be alternative measures you would be better suited to take - my understanding of the core-level structure of the protocol and your pool are not complete enough to say with authority exactly what you should do.
But more than you should say anything, you should do something, and it should be a step that makes it very clear your commitment to keeping the network trustless, and you should be very public and completely transparent about it.
And that is simply my two cents.
