Who cares about the 45% Ghash.io have - will you care when they are at 51%?

[QuestionAuthority]

Ghash.io can have 100% for all I care because no one is stupid enough to destroy a money maker that they have such a large stake in for a silly double spend. They are making a small fortune every day. Besides that in a few short years mining will be so prohibitively expensive that only a small handful of businesses will be doing it anyway. Decentralization will die with mining first. The security of the network is destined to be centralized.

[ljudotina]

Ghas.io was closer to 51% than this, and they stopped accepting new miners to prevent 51% happening. And as saomeone else said before me, why would they destroy something that's making them shitload of money.

[devphp]

As soon as you get rid of Bitcoin with its heavy legacy, your concerns will be gone and you can sleep well at night knowing that no evil entity can compromise the mining pools, disrupt network operation and/or force miners to anything. NXT is the future, it has fixed Bitcoin's faults, which will always come to haunt users of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is just an overpriced monster at this point, smart crypto money is moving into NXT. Ok, enough of this shameless promotion of NXT, you are all smart individuals, you can make your own informed decisions.

[Seldar]

Ghas.io was closer to 51% than this, and they stopped accepting new miners to prevent 51% happening. And as saomeone else said before me, why would they destroy something that's making them shitload of money.

Because it's a lot easier for an organization (let say China or USA) to threat one big group of people than hundred of small one...

[m5j0r]

I definitely think this is a huge problem.
Bitcoin is already centralized basically. One cant even participate a tiny little bit if one doesn't have expensive rigs, asics etc.

I don't think NXT is the solution, though it is definitely interesting.

[pawel7777]

Ghash.io can have 100% for all I care because no one is stupid enough to destroy a money maker that they have such a large stake in for a silly double spend.

In theory it can take as little as one pissed off employee. Although I've no idea how cex.io and their internal controls look from inside.

It's a bit comforting that the rate dropped to 43%, maybe they're doing something about it.

[QuestionAuthority]

Ghash.io can have 100% for all I care because no one is stupid enough to destroy a money maker that they have such a large stake in for a silly double spend.

In theory it can take as little as one pissed off employee. Although I've no idea how cex.io and their internal controls look from inside.

It's a bit comforting that the rate dropped to 43%, maybe they're doing something about it.

Eventually, if you keep using Bitcoin, you are going to trust the businesses that take over mining whether you like it or not.

[beetcoin]

i wonder if htey'd really fuck over BTC just like that.. especially if they have some invested in btc.

[tins]

i wonder if htey'd really fuck over BTC just like that.. especially if they have some invested in btc.

I don't see them doing that. It would end up costing them more than they could ever expect to gain/

[zimmah]

I remember ghash was close to 50% before and it doesn't amaze me that they are there again.

Ghash.io remains the best pool, and  no other  pool comes close.


To have a real long-term solution there need to be other pools that offer the same or better benefits as ghash.io:

Very low fees
Share the transaction fee income between miners (some pools keep it to themselves, which is ridiculous)
Clear stats on your hashrate and income
Automatic payout, preferably split between shareholders
API support to check your hashrate from mobile or browser plugin
Reliablilty
Total pool hashing power (to decrease variance)
Merged mining (=free extra money) preferably with automatic cash out or even automatic exchange to bitcoin


As long as ghash.io remains a far better pool than the competitors they will have way more hashrate

I would prefer if no single pool has more than 20% of hashrate, but there just arent enough pools that offer similar benefits.

[SlipperySlope]

The truth is that proof of work leads inevitably to a single hasher-pleasing dominant mining pool. The hashers have sufficient trust in that pool to permit a 51% attack, that hashers think is not a threat. Hashers have observed that the pools are well behaved, and those pools are efficient due to competition. The dominant pools knows that if there is misbehavior they will be possibly ruined by deserting hashers.

Thus proof-of-work as a means to secure the Bitcoin blockchain now fails Satoshi's design of a system in which there is no trusted third party. .

I suggest a better system in a discussion thread elsewhere on this forum.

[noSlave]

....and we're over 45%  now 

[Muhammed Zakir]

I do think it's an issue and to be honest I'm not particularly impressed with Ghash's response, or lack there of.

Especially when you compare it to the quick and effective response of BTC Guild when they were in the 40% bracket.

Some people have speculated that Ghash has mining power that totals above 50% already but their mining it off pool in order to avoid attention. I'm not saying that's true, but if they did end up with over 50% of the hashing power that would seem like it would be the most rational thing to do economically speaking(if and only if the public had no knowledge of it happening).

>50% attacks are real and should be taken seriously by the community. Even the threat of one is enough to seriously harm bitcoin in the eyes of the public. I don't even want to imagine what sort spin these modern media companies would put on it.

I don't even mine in Ghash.io . IMO its not very good site, there are a lot better sites with great support than Ghash.io .
Kindly,
        Muhammed Zakhir

[noSlave]

I do think it's an issue and to be honest I'm not particularly impressed with Ghash's response, or lack there of.

Especially when you compare it to the quick and effective response of BTC Guild when they were in the 40% bracket.

Some people have speculated that Ghash has mining power that totals above 50% already but their mining it off pool in order to avoid attention. I'm not saying that's true, but if they did end up with over 50% of the hashing power that would seem like it would be the most rational thing to do economically speaking(if and only if the public had no knowledge of it happening).

>50% attacks are real and should be taken seriously by the community. Even the threat of one is enough to seriously harm bitcoin in the eyes of the public. I don't even want to imagine what sort spin these modern media companies would put on it.

I don't even mine in Ghash.io . IMO its not very good site, there are a lot better sites with great support than Ghash.io .
Kindly,
        Muhammed Zakhir

jep, and the problem is, that Ghash.io own the hardware. There aren't so miner real miners. Most is done by themself

[Ron~Popeil]

I do think it's an issue and to be honest I'm not particularly impressed with Ghash's response, or lack there of.

Especially when you compare it to the quick and effective response of BTC Guild when they were in the 40% bracket.

Some people have speculated that Ghash has mining power that totals above 50% already but their mining it off pool in order to avoid attention. I'm not saying that's true, but if they did end up with over 50% of the hashing power that would seem like it would be the most rational thing to do economically speaking(if and only if the public had no knowledge of it happening).

>50% attacks are real and should be taken seriously by the community. Even the threat of one is enough to seriously harm bitcoin in the eyes of the public. I don't even want to imagine what sort spin these modern media companies would put on it.

I don't even mine in Ghash.io . IMO its not very good site, there are a lot better sites with great support than Ghash.io .
Kindly,
        Muhammed Zakhir

jep, and the problem is, that Ghash.io own the hardware. There aren't so miner real miners. Most is done by themself

There are a lot of miners with hardware pointed at ghash. They provide good stats and the pool is more profitable. It stands to reason that more people would use them.

[Willisius]

45% it's already very dangerous, it gives you very good chance of double spending, look at this Analysis of Hashrate-Based Double Spending (especially page 10).

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.2009v1.pdf

Thank you for linking this. According to the figures in the analysis (and with the assumptions it states being true), an attacker with 44% of the network hashrate has a 68.282% chance of successfully carrying out a double-spend attack, if the transaction has 6 confirmations. If you only wait for 3 confirmations, the chance of success goes up to 77.715%.

Thanks again, very interesting read.

[eleuthria]

Ghas.io was closer to 51% than this, and they stopped accepting new miners to prevent 51% happening. And as saomeone else said before me, why would they destroy something that's making them shitload of money.

FYI:  That never happened.  At no point in GHash's history have they halted registrations to prevent a 51% hash rate.  The only pool to ever do so was BTC Guild, and it did so at 45% of the network.  And the difference there was 100% of BTC Guild's hash rate was public, no private mining farm.  GHash.io continues to control a private mining farm of 40-50% of it's pool speed if not more, while trying to get more people to join their pool which has 0 economic sense behind it unless they plan on double spending or stealing from users (they're literally throwing money away to operate a public pool, spending time supporting people, and paying for servers, and gaining NOTHING from it).

[PalmerLaura]

This is crazy and I probably will get downvoted. But could a DDoS attack to the pool be organized somehow by the community? It would have to last long enough to make enough people leave cex.io though.

[QuestionAuthority]

This is crazy and I probably will get downvoted. But could a DDoS attack to the pool be organized somehow by the community? It would have to last long enough to make enough people leave cex.io though.

First, this isn't Reddit you can't be down voted. Second, that's illegal and we wouldn't want to get together and plan an illegal activity in front of all the LEOs that read this forum every day.

[Este Nuno]

The truth is that proof of work leads inevitably to a single hasher-pleasing dominant mining pool. The hashers have sufficient trust in that pool to permit a 51% attack, that hashers think is not a threat. Hashers have observed that the pools are well behaved, and those pools are efficient due to competition. The dominant pools knows that if there is misbehavior they will be possibly ruined by deserting hashers.

Thus proof-of-work as a means to secure the Bitcoin blockchain now fails Satoshi's design of a system in which there is no trusted third party. .

I suggest a better system in a discussion thread elsewhere on this forum.

There's probably too much money and power invested in the PoW infrastructure at this point for any real progress to be made. I appreciate what you're doing personally, but bitcoin is becoming an old dinosaur incapable of change or self criticism.