141–150 of 154 posts
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The difference is that if GHash.io launches an attack, miners have the choice to move to another pool. If the US government inflates the currency (yet again) there is nothing to do.
If GHash.io launches a "no one else can mine" attack, then there won't be any other pools to move to. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_... * Prevent some or all other miners from mining any valid blocks
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If the blockchain is dominated by a single interest, and that player starts abusing their market position, BitCoin's exchange rate will plummet and the economic interest in question will lose millions. So yes, it is in the community's interest and individual miners' interest to keep the hashrate distributed enough to prevent that from happening. What happens when people lose faith in the system? The 2008 financial cr…
And nobody in the world wants Bitcoin to break down?
Take a deep breath. Stop hyperventilating. Bitcoin has died a violent, crashy, gory death dozens of times at this point. It's in Bitcoin community's, and GHash's, economic interest that no miner exceeds 50%. That's all you need to know to know that this is just another exasperated hand-wringer proclaiming the premature death of BitCoin. BitCoin, RIP 2008 - 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, ?
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When they bought the mining machines they were entering bitcoin as long weren't they? They can't even sell their future winnings as they don't have them yet, so they are really long!
Well, they aren't long bitcoin from buying mining rigs, they are long bitcoin call options denominated in energy. If the return seems likely to be too low, as eventually it must be when (if things continue) people make more efficient rigs, then it would eventually be in their interest to let the longer term options expire. It is totally conceivable that taking a huge short position and scaring everyone off of btc cou…
I don't really know what GHash knows, but I can tell you that GHash's hashrate has dipped well below 50% only a day later, as it did when this happened before.
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Well, they aren't long bitcoin from buying mining rigs, they are long bitcoin call options denominated in energy. If the return seems likely to be too low, as eventually it must be when (if things continue) people make more efficient rigs, then it would eventually be in their interest to let the longer term options expire. It is totally conceivable that taking a huge short position and scaring everyone off of btc cou…
In other words, the stars would have to align in order for this to occur. I don't really know what GHash knows, but I can tell you that GHash's hashrate has dipped well below 50% only a day later, as it did when this happened before.
The threat here is that a single group has the capability to produce 51% of the hashes, possibly reliably (we can't know whether scaling back was deliberate or happenstance). It doesn't matter whether they are persistently using that capability.
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In other words, the stars would have to align in order for this to occur. I don't really know what GHash knows, but I can tell you that GHash's hashrate has dipped well below 50% only a day later, as it did when this happened before.
The stars would have to align for it to be genuinely a good idea. Which... well... stars align, sometimes. Moreover, people make mistakes and think stars have aligned. The threat here is that a single group has the capability to produce 51% of the hashes, possibly reliably (we can't know whether scaling back was deliberate or happenstance). It doesn't matter whether they are persistently using that capability.
It's strange, this situation where in there are all these things that would be seriously problematic were they to happen, unless of course they actually happen, in which case they're not actually a problem at all.
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> The pool would notice that certain participants contributions are conflicting with other discoveries, and ban such participants? How? Or, you ban me, I sign up again under a different alias.
The pool can use a 2% fee for old accounts and a 20% fee for new accounts (for example, with less than 1 month or less than 10^x hashes calculated.)
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Is 3% in three years really "monumental" progress? I honestly don't know much about the issue, but those numbers hardly seem monumental to me.
It's been on an exponential growth curve for a number of years, and the doubling time recently decreased to about 8 months. Whether that continues is of course anyone's guess, but if it does, after another three years it would be at 20-40% (depending on whether you take the recent trend ( http://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1V1MLaAEiuNI99s7NO2ZgQ... ) or the longer term trend ( http://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…
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When they bought the mining machines they were entering bitcoin as long weren't they? They can't even sell their future winnings as they don't have them yet, so they are really long!
Well, they aren't long bitcoin from buying mining rigs, they are long bitcoin call options denominated in energy. If the return seems likely to be too low, as eventually it must be when (if things continue) people make more efficient rigs, then it would eventually be in their interest to let the longer term options expire. It is totally conceivable that taking a huge short position and scaring everyone off of btc cou…
You mean, "denominated in energy divided by global hashing power (of all miners collectively)".
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Well, they aren't long bitcoin from buying mining rigs, they are long bitcoin call options denominated in energy. If the return seems likely to be too low, as eventually it must be when (if things continue) people make more efficient rigs, then it would eventually be in their interest to let the longer term options expire. It is totally conceivable that taking a huge short position and scaring everyone off of btc cou…
>they are long bitcoin call options denominated in energy You mean, "denominated in energy divided by global hashing power (of all miners collectively)".