Is Bitcoin about to be 51%ed???

[AuroraHF]

Damn, it's 44% in the last 24 hours.

https://blockchain.info/pools?timespan=24hrs

This is really dangerous, boycott GHASH.IO!

[1714805143]

1714805143

[Gianluca95]

No, there are too much interest to make an attack to the bitcoin block chain.

[sed]

What I don't understand about this is why miners wouldn't join another pool if they see their current pool is in such a large majority.  Who wants to be part of the downfall of the currency they are actively trying to mine?

They should be.  Like someone said, there should be a guideline to unjoin or not join any pool above 35%.

The danger is that if a pool got to be 51%, they could choose to shut everyone else out,
gain 100% of blocks, and then they would be the ONLY pool anyone could make money from.

I don't think you got the last part of that right.  However, I guess it's a matter of balancing overall best-interest of your community versus personal best intrerest.  I'm not a miner but I guess as individuals everyone has incentive to join the pool with the best deal/offer.

[moriartybitcoin]

No, there are too much interest to make an attack to the bitcoin block chain.

Even if Ghash.io has the best intentions in the world, the potential for a hacker or rogue employee to gain control of the mining pool and conduct an attack is significant.  The whole premise of Bitcoin is not to TRUST a single entity anyway ..

[jonald_fyookball]

What I don't understand about this is why miners wouldn't join another pool if they see their current pool is in such a large majority.  Who wants to be part of the downfall of the currency they are actively trying to mine?

They should be.  Like someone said, there should be a guideline to unjoin or not join any pool above 35%.

The danger is that if a pool got to be 51%, they could choose to shut everyone else out,
gain 100% of blocks, and then they would be the ONLY pool anyone could make money from.

I don't think you got the last part of that right.  However, I guess it's a matter of balancing overall best-interest of your community versus personal best intrerest.  I'm not a miner but I guess as individuals everyone has incentive to join the pool with the best deal/offer.

Why isn't it right?

I suppose that as soon as that happened, miners would leave...but they could certainly take full control for as long as they had the majority.

[Crypto_123]

No, there are too much interest to make an attack to the bitcoin block chain.

Even if Ghash.io has the best intentions in the world, the potential for a hacker or rogue employee to gain control of the mining pool and conduct an attack is significant.  The whole premise of Bitcoin is not to TRUST a single entity anyway ..

So true. So what are possible solutions?

[jonald_fyookball]

No, there are too much interest to make an attack to the bitcoin block chain.

Even if Ghash.io has the best intentions in the world, the potential for a hacker or rogue employee to gain control of the mining pool and conduct an attack is significant.  The whole premise of Bitcoin is not to TRUST a single entity anyway ..

So true. So what are possible solutions?

People must leave gash. Already happening .bitfury pulling out. Hopefully others to follow.
More 0% pools should start too.

[froggyfeels]

I am worried along with Peter Todd, Mike Hearn, etc.
There is scenarios were it wouldn't matter what the miners, Ghash, etc do.
It is 100% possible...and if you don't believe it then you should consult for btc core developers.
The problem isn't the double spend...you get 51%, hard fork, and an entity could change the rules for miners and how they are confirming transactions. Please see below.

Check out this great interview with Peter Todd who goes through the process of a hard farking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX0imwGHK0A

I don't think it would be any 1 pool that would do this for other than monetary purposes...but just that it is possible is concerning and a weakness in the scalability of btc.

I still love you bitcoin :-)

[sed]

Any update on this scenario?  There was a lot of talk about this two weeks ago.  Did anyone pull out of ghash?  Can no one compete with them?  What's the current situation looking like?

[Harley997]

No, there are too much interest to make an attack to the bitcoin block chain.

Even if Ghash.io has the best intentions in the world, the potential for a hacker or rogue employee to gain control of the mining pool and conduct an attack is significant.  The whole premise of Bitcoin is not to TRUST a single entity anyway ..

Even if ghash were to get hacked there would be nothing to stop the miners from simply leaving the pool in mass in the event ghash/a hacker were to use ghash's hashpower to launch an attack

[sed]

Is there a .info site I can look at to see the current distribution?  I'm trying to find out an update to this topic but I don't know where to look for the latest mining pool stats.  Any suggestions?

[Gyrsur]

*blub*

[phillipsjk]

Is there a .info site I can look at to see the current distribution?  I'm trying to find out an update to this topic but I don't know where to look for the latest mining pool stats.  Any suggestions?

I like Bitcoincharts.com, but they appear to just use the Blockchain.info data.

[QuestionAuthority]

Hardware mining is fail. Use NXT.

NXT is proof that no one really buys anything with Bitcoin. It's mainly for speculation.

[spainful]

Well done - down to 38% so far
Where's that dude that was supposed to be starting P2Pool?

[jonald_fyookball]

Hardware mining is fail. Use NXT.

NXT is proof that no one really buys anything with Bitcoin. It's mainly for speculation.

that made no sense.

and NXT is irrelevant.  right now it doesn't even have a Wikipedia page.

[Brewins]

The 51% stuff is overrated. No one would kill what they have control, and what can give them billions of $. A 51% atack in the bitcoin network would be the equivalent to an action movie like Olympus Has Fallen happening in real life.


Even the effects of the 51% attacks are overrated. It would be the biggest trollage made, but with few real effects.

[QuestionAuthority]

Hardware mining is fail. Use NXT.

NXT is proof that no one really buys anything with Bitcoin. It's mainly for speculation.

that made no sense.

and NXT is irrelevant.  right now it doesn't even have a Wikipedia page.

Don't you judge me because I drink and post! I was so wasted that night that I don't even remember what I was thinking when I wrote that. lol

[galbros]

The 51% stuff is overrated. No one would kill what they have control, and what can give them billions of $. A 51% atack in the bitcoin network would be the equivalent to an action movie like Olympus Has Fallen happening in real life.

Even the effects of the 51% attacks are overrated. It would be the biggest trollage made, but with few real effects.

While there are many other threads on this, the key thing is that if Ghash hits 51% then bitcoin ceases to be decentralized.  There are lots of things they can do that don't destroy bitcoin but make it much less pleasant for other miners.  While they can't take our coins, they can act in a very opportunistic manner towards other pools.  The people over at Hacking Distributed have written on this quite a bit and proposed a solution they seem to think will work but it would require a hard fork.

I am concerned by this, though not in a panic.  I hope someone else, maybe the bitcoin foundation, will start a no fee pool until someone comes up with a business model that can match Ghash.io.

[phillipsjk]

I was surprised to learn that the original white-paper addresses this to a certain extent:

The incentive may help encourage nodes to stay honest. If a greedy attacker is able to
assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes, he would have to choose between using it
to defraud people by stealing back his payments, or using it to generate new coins. He ought to
find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than
everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth.

That implies that Satoshi expected this to happen on occasion (and it has in the past, some other old-timer mentioned Slush, Deepbit and BTC-guild). It also implies that he expected the mining industry to be very competitive by the time the mining reward drops to 0.

What is different this time is that most of the hashers pointed at Ghash.io don't seem to understand why it is a problem. While it it true that incentives mean this is not an emergency, it is still not a good long-term situation.

What is supposed to happen now is that people seeing the risk of centralization add more hash-power, and hashers (which I think Satoshi did not anticipate) point their hardware elsewhere.