You are threatening Bitcoin’s security

[dikidera]

Now you are plain and simple insulting him by saying he is defective. I am at at slush's pool for a few days now.

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[N12]

Now you are plain and simple insulting him by saying he is defective. I am at at slush's pool for a few days now.

The point of Bitcoin is decentralization. I don’t want to trust deepbit’s operator in order to use Bitcoin. Malicious entities could easily gain the majority of the hashrate if they colluded with pool operators.

Trust is everything in a currency. If Bitcoin experiences any such problem, trust will vanish very quickly.

[gmaxwell]

I think we need Tycho to voluntarily block new people until he is below 33% (and that is a high amount already) of the hash rate. And convince the slush guy to do the same too.

Free market man, Tycho should not FORCE people out of his pool...

No, he should just increase the fees further.  He's already the most expensive and still the biggest— even if you make some downtime argument— 2% fee pays for 28 minutes/day in downtime— and deepbit has not been perfectly reliable either. I bet he could take 15% and still be at a third. 0_o

Win win.


The security concerns don't require the operators of the pool to be evil. They could be compromised, for example. And there have already been pool security compromises.

Adding to the security paranoia arguments the system reliability argument: If a pool has 50% of the hashrate and it goes down, then we lose 50% of our transaction processing capacity.  This would especially be bad in difficulty-cycles where hashrate had shrunk so that we were already behind 10 minutes / block.

[speeder]

Indeed, that idea is better

Freemarket ftw!


Someone can ask Tycho to raise his fees?

[SgtSpike]

I think we need Tycho to voluntarily block new people until he is below 33% (and that is a high amount already) of the hash rate. And convince the slush guy to do the same too.

Free market man, Tycho should not FORCE people out of his pool...

No, he should just increase the fees further.  He's already the most expensive and still the biggest— even if you make some downtime argument— 2% fee pays for 28 minutes/day in downtime— and deepbit has not been perfectly reliable either. I bet he could take 15% and still be at a third. 0_o

This.

People obviously think there is extra value in his pool, so he should capitalize on that and let the free market do what it does best.  Some would leave, some would stay, he would probably end up making MORE bitcoins/hr than he is now, and the bitcoin community would be more secure because of it.

[Grinder]

No, I had only one serious downtime on mining interface, others were service restarts, which is normal on all pools. Oh, I was also DoSed twice, but it is long time ago and it wasn't total outage, pool was just slower for few hours.

It's possible that my impression of your pool is wrong, but you seem to have a lot of invalid blocks every now and then. 21 in the last 1000 blocks right now means 2.1% fewer bitcoins for me. The lack of long polling also takes a bit off the top. All in all I believe my profit is higher at Deepbit.

[slush]

but you seem to have a lot of invalid blocks every now and then. 21 in the last 1000 blocks right now means 2.1% fewer bitcoins for me.

Majority of those invalid blocks were caused by outage, so we're still talking about this one issue before two weeks.

[alexdrans]

Has Deepbit.net gone down?

[gkolt]

Is there any open source pool software yet? Might help if anyone could easily set up their pool.

Yup, that would help.

And, thats what I'm looking for right now.
This way, I can start my own mining pool with friends and such.

[speeder]

Ok, example of danger of big pools while not offending them:

How to corrupt the bitcoin network:


First, create a computer with hashing power that is a little bigger than the entire network - slush - deepbit - elegius.
Second, prepare that computer to do whatever skewed thing you want to do.
Third, DDoS deepbit, slush and elegius.
Fourth, turn on the computer that you built, and enjoy your 51% of network power while the 3 DDoSed pools scramble to get back up.
Fifth... sell all your BTC?
Sixth... profit as the market crash in desperation?

[[Tycho]]

Has Deepbit.net gone down?

The pool's site was unavailable for a few seconds - I was installing HTTPS/SSL support :) Done now.

[xf2_org]

Is there any open source pool software yet? Might help if anyone could easily set up their pool.

Sigh, read your own forums, open source pool software has been mentioned repeatedly

URL: https://github.com/jgarzik/pushpool

[error]

Is there any open source pool software yet? Might help if anyone could easily set up their pool.

Sigh, read your own forums, open source pool software has been mentioned repeatedly

URL: https://github.com/jgarzik/pushpool

Pushpool is nice, but it's not a complete solution. For instance, there's no front end to provide a web interface and manage workers and payouts.

[Dayofswords]

Slush is too unstable

If you're thinking about that time it went down, that was literally the only time I've ever seen or had trouble with his pool.

[M4v3R]

Pushpool is nice, but it's not a complete solution. For instance, there's no front end to provide a web interface and manage workers and payouts.

Just make a bounty and I'll happily build one.

[Dude65535]

A pool operator would have to be able to pull off a very large double spend to offset the long term losses from people leaving the pool for good.

[rezin777]

A pool operator would have to be able to pull off a very large double spend to offset the long term losses from people leaving the pool for good.

The idea is that the motivation isn't economic.

The idea is that it can happen for any reason, and it can happen much easier if the main prerequisite for the attack is already in place: one person controlling >50% of the network.

The idea is that it doesn't necessarily even have to be the pool operator that does the attack.

The idea is that trust in Bitcoin, and thus the value of Bitcoins, will be lost because of the attack.

The idea is that it is in the best interests of everyone who mines Bitcoins to voluntarily keep the network healthy in order to prevent the possibility of such an attack from occurring in the first place.

[Nesetalis]

hmm.. perhaps in this case it may be best if there is a safeguard built in to bitcoin to prevent shares greater than 30% on a single pool? then again, how do you determine who belongs to what? you could have 50 pools working together.. blah...

[rezin777]

hmm.. perhaps in this case it may be best if there is a safeguard built in to bitcoin to prevent shares greater than 30% on a single pool? then again, how do you determine who belongs to what? you could have 50 pools working together.. blah...

It would be interesting if there could be a technological solution to this problem. Until then, it's up to the miners to keep the network healthy for their own good. Also, an attack from a collusion of 50 pools is much more difficult than an attack from 1 pool. The more decentralized the network is, the more secure it becomes.

[Nesetalis]

i meant. if you had the raw processing power to take 51%.. you could make it 50 different pools of 1.02% so it looked like 50 people held 51%... when in truth it was a single person pulling all the strings.