[2014-06-12] Air Herald: BTC Mining Pool Unrepentant Over the 51% Attack Risks

[bryant.coleman]

http://airherald.com/btc-mining-pool-unrepentant-over-the-51-attack-risks/2359/

According to Ghash.io, they do not have any intention of executing the 51% attack. They understand the fact that it will do more harm to Bitcoin community. On the contrary, they intend to expand the community and also utilize hashing power for developing a good bitcoin economic structure. In case the Bitcoin gets affected on the whole, it will seriously threaten their investment in hardware. It will also damage those who prefer Bitcoin. Therefore, Ghash.io will have nothing to achieve by having 51 percent stake in bitcoin mining.

[niothor]

The most important fact:

As a result, Ghash.io publicly announced about their Mitigation Plan in a press release. About six months ago, Ghash.io assured the customers of Cex.io that the mining pool would allow them to point the hashing power towards some of the other pools. This will help to decentralize the mining power under a single pool. Until now, Ghash/Cex has not fulfilled this promise.

And they will never do..

They might even have more that 51% hashing power and some of their mining equipment might be mining either in the 20% unknown or even in the other pools.

[fryarminer]

They don't get it.

They are actively harming bitcoin by simply having a hash rate that close to 51%, and will harm bitcoin even more once they have more than 51%.

Even if they do no attack or even if they promise not to attack.  The very fact that they are in that position is fatally harmful to bitcoin.

[bitbybitbybitcoin]

From my article: http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/news/bitcoin-mining-pool-ghash-io-is-unapologetic-risk-theoretical-51-attack/2014/06/12

CCN reached out to Ghash/Cex days ago and has just received a response from Jeffrey Smith, Cex.io’s Chief Information Officer, to a short interview:

CCN: What percentage of ghash.io’s hashing power is from cex.io? What percentage from other miners?

Jeffrey Smith: The hashing power of CEX.IO constitutes 25 percent of GHash.IO total hash rate. The rest are independent miners.

CCN: Also… how is the functionality for allowing cex users to point their hashing power elsewhere?

Jeffrey Smith: It is very hard to implement this functionality, since on CEX.IO we allow users to trade even small portions of GHS (e.g. 0.001 GHS), and these small amounts cannot be separately connected to other mining pools.

CCN: What has ghash.io learned from the last time this happened?

Jeffrey Smith: We understand that the Bitcoin community strongly reacts to GHash.IO’s percentage of the total hash rate. However, we would never do anything to harm the Bitcoin economy; we believe in it. We have invested all our effort, time and money into the development of the Bitcoin economy. We agree that mining should be decentralised, but you cannot blame GHash.IO for being the #1 mining pool.

CCN: What steps were put in place to ensure something like this didn’t happen again? (stop accepting miners when you guys are at 50%?)

Jeffrey Smith: <blank>

CCN: Which failsafes have been tripped in the last few days; what has ghash.io done in the last few days?

Jeffrey Smith: We strongly believe that Bitcoin mining should be decentralised. We have been working hard for the past several months to ensure decentralisation of Bitcoin mining. Soon we will present a valid solution to this issue.

CCN: What is ghash.io’s comfortable level for total percentage of network hashrate? It seems there might be some disconnect between your company’s vision and the community’s tolerance level.

Jeffrey Smith: The bitcoin community determines the comfortable level of the GHash.IO’s percentage. We aim to please our users and provide quality trading and mining environment, while maintaining stability and prosperity of the Bitcoin community.

[CoinMode]

They don't get it.

They are actively harming bitcoin by simply having a hash rate that close to 51%, and will harm bitcoin even more once they have more than 51%.

Even if they do no attack or even if they promise not to attack.  The very fact that they are in that position is fatally harmful to bitcoin.

They are probably also buying coins right now because they know Wall Street is going to start selling to every Tom, Dick, and Harry next year after all the fat cats have bought in. Then they will dump their coins and redistribute the hashrate to increase demand to match their new supply from the sell-off of 2015.