You are threatening Bitcoin’s security

[vuce]

This thread topic is exactly why I never thought that open pools were a good idea.  That said, the ability to create more pools will lead to a proliferation of said pools competing for contributers.  So it's unlikely that any one pool could ever collect the 50% minimum in order to attack the blockchain even for a short while, as the more pools there continue to be, the less of a percentage that each is ever likely to be able to accumulate.

Actually, the reason why I use Deepbit is that all the others I would consider are so small. Size is one of Deepbits biggest competitive advantages, because the whole point of using a pool is to get a regular flow of bitcoins. More pools means that the remaining hashing power is spread even thinner. That just increases Deepbit's advantage.

+1

[presha]

just move half of your gpus/rigs to other mine

[huayra.agera]

Solo mining (very brief) guide:

1. one bitcoin daemon, many miners. (OBMM)

  On your local network you run one bitcoind. It is listening on 127.0.0.1:8332 . Unless there are improvement in latest version and you do not want to hack bitcoind source code you can simply run a http proxy which listens on one of your LAN IP's and proxyes it to 127.0.0.1:8332. I personally use haproxy with 5 line config. You than point your miners to this proxy.

2. many bitcoin daemons, many miners. (MBMM)

  On every miner machine you run it's own bitcoind and point your miners software to local bitcoind daemon listening on 127.0.0.1:8332.

3. one bitcoin daemon, many miners via ssh (OBMMssh)

  Same as OBMM but you use ssh port forwarding to get access to bitcoind's machine 127.0.0.1:8332. Check out autossh.

 

i've always been interested in setting up a pool for my gpus. How do i connect let's say miners 4 and 5 to 1,2,3? Scenario is gpu 4&5 are in another house, how do i make the 5 gpus combine their hashing power into solving a block cooperatively? I hope I'm clear on my explanation. Any help would be very greatly appreciated!

[Soepkip]

The idea Tycho would do something with his 'powers' as soon as his pool reaches 50% is just simply stupid.

Currently (in the current market) the guy makes 1000 - 1300$ PER DAY , that is 30k to 39k PER MONTH. In untaxed money even.

He would be stupid to do anything to destabilize the bitcoin market.

[N12]

The idea Tycho would do something with his 'powers' as soon as his pool reaches 50% is just simply stupid.

Currently (in the current market) the guy makes 1000 - 1300$ PER DAY , that is 30k to 39k PER MONTH. In untaxed money even.

He would be stupid to do anything to destabilize the bitcoin market.

So what? There are lots of entities that would like to endanger Bitcoin and they would certainly bribe/infiltrate with money that would let your figures look like peanuts. But yeah, let’s just wait until this happens and trust in Bitcoin vanishes in an instant. As long as you can get USD for your Bitcoins everything’s fine.

[grndzero]

The idea Tycho would do something with his 'powers' as soon as his pool reaches 50% is just simply stupid.

Currently (in the current market) the guy makes 1000 - 1300$ PER DAY , that is 30k to 39k PER MONTH. In untaxed money even.

He would be stupid to do anything to destabilize the bitcoin market.

So what? There are lots of entities that would like to endanger Bitcoin and they would certainly bribe/infiltrate with money that would let your figures look like peanuts. But yeah, let’s just wait until this happens and trust in Bitcoin vanishes in an instant. As long as you can get USD for your Bitcoins everything’s fine.

Yes, there's a long theoretical list of people who might like to endanger Bitcoin. If any one of them have that much cash available to them then they can also build a super cluster and/or manipulate/corner the market. Both can be accomplished pretty easily and with relative anonymity for someone with said amount of cash. Trust would only vanish for people who are only worried about getting USD for their Bitcoins.

[redicarus]

The idea Tycho would do something with his 'powers' as soon as his pool reaches 50% is just simply stupid.

Currently (in the current market) the guy makes 1000 - 1300$ PER DAY , that is 30k to 39k PER MONTH. In untaxed money even.

He would be stupid to do anything to destabilize the bitcoin market.

So what? There are lots of entities that would like to endanger Bitcoin and they would certainly bribe/infiltrate with money that would let your figures look like peanuts. But yeah, let’s just wait until this happens and trust in Bitcoin vanishes in an instant. As long as you can get USD for your Bitcoins everything’s fine.

Yes, there's a long theoretical list of people who might like to endanger Bitcoin. If any one of them have that much cash available to them then they can also build a super cluster and/or manipulate/corner the market. Both can be accomplished pretty easily and with relative anonymity for someone with said amount of cash. Trust would only vanish for people who are only worried about getting USD for their Bitcoins.

Based on the structure of bitcoin, wouldn't sheer processing power be the least profitable way to attempt to attack it? I'm more worried about tycho losing control of deepbit; the thought that entire this currency might hinge on one individual's security measures is a little disconcerting.

[speeder]

Lots of people are MISSING THE GODAMN POINT.


With 3 pools having way more than 50% of power (this already happens), WE DO NOT NEED THE POOL OPERATORS TO DO SHIT, WE ONLY NEED SOMEONE TO DDOS THEM TO HAVE BITCOIN FAIL.


You people understood now?


Ok, I already wrote that before and it do not worked.



WE DO NOT NEED THE POOL OPERATORS TO DO SHIT, WE ONLY NEED SOMEONE TO SOMEHOW SHUT THEM DOWN AT THE SAME TIME TO MAKE BITCOIN FAIL.

I hope now people understand better the risk of the 3 pools with more than 50%

[grndzero]

Lots of people are MISSING THE GODAMN POINT.


With 3 pools having way more than 50% of power (this already happens), WE DO NOT NEED THE POOL OPERATORS TO DO SHIT, WE ONLY NEED SOMEONE TO DDOS THEM TO HAVE BITCOIN FAIL.


You people understood now?


Ok, I already wrote that before and it do not worked.



WE DO NOT NEED THE POOL OPERATORS TO DO SHIT, WE ONLY NEED SOMEONE TO SOMEHOW SHUT THEM DOWN AT THE SAME TIME TO MAKE BITCOIN FAIL.

I hope now people understand better the risk of the 3 pools with more than 50%

Bitcoin doesn't fail because the pools go down. There's still at least 1/4-1/3 of the network out there working solo and as soon as people see that the pools are down all the technical users will switch to solo and the semi-technical will be looking for information on how to go solo. The network will most likey be back to at least half speed in 6-8 hours at the most. That's a far cry from total failure!

And since both slush and bitcoinpool have both publicly acknowledged being ddos'd and they're stlll surviving it would take a lot more than that.

[N12]

If any sort of takeover happens, I can garuantee you Bitcoins will be almost worthless faster than you could react and will have a very hard time ever recovering.

People will never value a currency that can be taken down this easily. No value, no currency.

[Soepkip]

Lots of people are MISSING THE GODAMN POINT.


With 3 pools having way more than 50% of power (this already happens), WE DO NOT NEED THE POOL OPERATORS TO DO SHIT, WE ONLY NEED SOMEONE TO DDOS THEM TO HAVE BITCOIN FAIL.


You people understood now?


Ok, I already wrote that before and it do not worked.



WE DO NOT NEED THE POOL OPERATORS TO DO SHIT, WE ONLY NEED SOMEONE TO SOMEHOW SHUT THEM DOWN AT THE SAME TIME TO MAKE BITCOIN FAIL.

I hope now people understand better the risk of the 3 pools with more than 50%

In this sense a big enough botnet could kill all pools. Effectively the safest thing would be to stop pooling.

[grndzero]

If any sort of takeover happens, I can garuantee you Bitcoins will be almost worthless faster than you could react and will have a very hard time ever recovering.

People will never value a currency that can be taken down this easily. No value, no currency.

Currency exists on trust, value is secondary. Everyone seemed to trust it enough to to be making businesses exchanging it for cash back when it was US$0.80 per BTC when I first started using Bitcoin. The fact that it floats between US$7-8 per BTC is nice, but if you're only worried about it's value then apparently that's all you're into it for. Every currencies value fluctuates all the time, there is no question that Bitcoins will be minted in the future and there will be a finite amount of coins in the end. I trust that more than the US printing more money.

[Littleshop]

The idea Tycho would do something with his 'powers' as soon as his pool reaches 50% is just simply stupid.

Currently (in the current market) the guy makes 1000 - 1300$ PER DAY , that is 30k to 39k PER MONTH. In untaxed money even.

He would be stupid to do anything to destabilize the bitcoin market.

The idea that his pool is too large is not stupid, it is a valid concern.  If you are worried about the security of bitcoin you should try to not put such a large area of trust in anyone's hands.  While I agree it is not in Tycho's interest to do anything bad and really doubt he would..... an intrusion (attack) into his systems (online or physical) could effect the network.

[grndzero]

This has potential to decrease barrier of entry into double spending biz significantly, at least temporarily. This is a valid attack vector. Take down major miners and pools with DDOS, than deploy your hashing capacity and do whatever a short term 50% attack allows you.

Better start thinking about network resiliency now.

On the other hand, any such attack will only generate another wave of publicity for bitcoin.

Someone would either already have to have a LOT of coins, buy up a lot of them at the market, or investing in a lot hardware to get enough coins to make an attack like that worth it. They would have to accurately predict what the network hash speed after said take down would be and have more than that running. I doubt DDos could do it effectively, it would have to be a more sophisticated attack than that on all pools are the same time and something to leave them offline for an extended period of time. Compound that by pools starting to have backups on different continents now. After all is said and done, someone might try this just so they can double spend what? 100,000? 200,000? 250,000 BTC? Confidence would definitely take a hit and value would definitely plummet for sure. At best they would be getting their almost worthless coins back.

It sounds more far fetched and much harder than pool operators conspiring to pull double spend attacks.

I agree it would be great publicity, especially when the network survived. BTC might be back to $US0.25 per BTC, but it would survive like it was designed to do.

[grndzero]

The idea Tycho would do something with his 'powers' as soon as his pool reaches 50% is just simply stupid.

Currently (in the current market) the guy makes 1000 - 1300$ PER DAY , that is 30k to 39k PER MONTH. In untaxed money even.

He would be stupid to do anything to destabilize the bitcoin market.

The idea that his pool is too large is not stupid, it is a valid concern.  If you are worried about the security of bitcoin you should try to not put such a large area of trust in anyone's hands.  While I agree it is not in Tycho's interest to do anything bad and really doubt he would..... an intrusion (attack) into his systems (online or physical) could effect the network.

So someone get's into his network. Say they manage to take every coin in the system and send it to themselves. Say they even manage to wipe out the logs files so it can't be tracked. It would still show in the block chain. If the pool operators didn't notice it, the users surely would when they weren't getting payouts, and pretty quickly inform the pool operators. Worst case scenario they halt all mining and go into investigation mode. People see that the pool is inaccessible and go elsewhere just like they did when slush's pool went down. There's a very limited time window for an attack like that. A more sophisticated approach would be to redirect the last 2 or 3 digits of the balance, but since people with updated clients can see that and all transactions are public it would be found out eventually. Sure people would freak out, but the network would endure.

[goatpig]

This thread topic is exactly why I never thought that open pools were a good idea.  That said, the ability to create more pools will lead to a proliferation of said pools competing for contributers.  So it's unlikely that any one pool could ever collect the 50% minimum in order to attack the blockchain even for a short while, as the more pools there continue to be, the less of a percentage that each is ever likely to be able to accumulate.

Actually, the reason why I use Deepbit is that all the others I would consider are so small. Size is one of Deepbits biggest competitive advantages, because the whole point of using a pool is to get a regular flow of bitcoins. More pools means that the remaining hashing power is spread even thinner. That just increases Deepbit's advantage.

No. Simply no. Unless you intent to mine for ridiculously short period of times, every pool will provide you with the same payout minus fee in the long run. The reward for mining is to secure the network. To brainlessly jump into the biggest pool because you like the pretty numbers is a mistake, effectively using the very tool that secures the network to harm it. It's like saying human beings need water to survive and then trying to drown the guy.

If your interest is indeed lowering variance, then you should be spreading your mining power evenly among ever possible pool. Also Deepbit is the most expensive pool out there. I am wondering what kind of people make a point of paying higher fees in the process of ripping the same reward...

[goatpig]

I am wondering what kind of people make a point of paying higher fees in the process of ripping the same reward...

I would answer your question, but I try not to use derogative terms and reportedly there is at least one lady among us. 

xD

[speeder]

Also assuming the motivation for such attack would be economical is a weakness too.

Suppose the US decide to get rid of bitcoin. They only need to put CIA to DDoS the 3 pools, and Roadrunner to create a chain split that make business unreliable (if not outright seemly fraudulent), as soon people start to mistrust each other unti they figure what is going on, not only the bitcoin market will crash, but people will freak out, and stop using BTC, in a worry that it will happen again, and after that we will have the issue of merging the chains again or rolling back everything or something like that.

People that assume someone will attack the network to doublespend are naive, at best. Or so greedy that they can only think in greedy terms.

[grndzero]

Also assuming the motivation for such attack would be economical is a weakness too.

Suppose the US decide to get rid of bitcoin. They only need to put CIA to DDoS the 3 pools, and Roadrunner to create a chain split that make business unreliable (if not outright seemly fraudulent), as soon people start to mistrust each other unti they figure what is going on, not only the bitcoin market will crash, but people will freak out, and stop using BTC, in a worry that it will happen again, and after that we will have the issue of merging the chains again or rolling back everything or something like that.

People that assume someone will attack the network to doublespend are naive, at best. Or so greedy that they can only think in greedy terms.

 The US government would be more inclined to listen in on the network and watch transactions or just find where the pools are hosted and raid them, including Great Britain, Canada, and any other friendly countries. From there they would find out who was making the most amount of money and trace them back by IP wherever possible within their jurisdiction and build an income tax fraud case against them. This wouldn't happen for a few years though since coins didn't have much value this tax season, not many people could say they actually made a profit. No government has been able to shut down Bittorrent. They raid and seize servers that are hosting pirated movie, music, games, software, etc. but they haven't stopped it from existing. It's just psychological warfare to make people think twice before pirating. The only time they manage to take down a network is when it has a central point like Napster and Limewire.

 To think that any government or treasury would bother with bitcoin anytime in the near future seems pretty far fetched to me. There's only 6.245 million in existence at a peak ( ~8.00 ) value of about US $50 million.

[Nesetalis]

obviously the solution here.. isnt necessarily that tycho's pool should be smaller.. its that it should be more reliable and spread out. say 10 pools, each one hosted in a different country on a different server... :p take out one, you only take out 10% of his total.

just telling him to shrink his pool isnt going to be effective.