13 ms·

It's Time For a Hard Bitcoin Fork

243 points by AaronFriel 12y ago

wmf 12y ago
Like IPv4, the "experiment" has grown so large that it may be impossible to get consensus on any non-backwards-compatible change.
- cdh 12y ago
  I'm not sure this is true, regardless of how large Bitcoin grows to be. If a significant enough problem were discovered, wouldn't it be in everyone's best interest to protect the value of their wallets by accepting a forked blockchain?
  - Zikes 12y ago
    Wouldn't GHash be able to pivot their existing mining power to take 51% of that new blockchain?
    - stcredzero 12y ago
      Depends on what changes to the algorithm are involved.
    - coolfuzion 12y ago
      An older discussion thread worth considering: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=327767.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=327767.0
    - adventured 12y ago
      Yes, the extrapolation being missed by the article, is that the rich will control bitcoin, and nothing can ever stop that from happening. It goes to the very core of how bitcoin is designed that allows for it to be dominated by a large rich entity with enough processing power. Inherently the 'little guy' will be priced out of bitcoin, it was always going to be that way. Whether it's one or ten entities in question doesn't matter, bitcoin will be dominated by rich, powerful companies or persons, and that powerful position will only increase in fortification with time. This principle pops the utopian fantasy of bitcoin that some cling to, but only a different approach to digital currencies will get you around the issue. Money & power always consolidates down to the hands of a few that will possess dramatic influence compared to the rest of the market participants. See: JP Morgan, pre-Fed.
      - jayd3e 12y ago
        That's a grim reality if true. I don't have any information that would refute this claim, so I can't disagree, and it actually makes a lot of sense.
      - wmf 12y ago
        the rich will control bitcoin, and nothing can ever stop that from happening. But should the rich have control in proportion to their richness or out of proportion to it? That's the key issue that I see behind this article (and the previous selfish mining work).
    - tempestn 12y ago
      The proposed change would allow any GHash member to essentially steal mining profits from GHash (by taking the full reward for any blocks found, while still sharing in the reward for blocks found by other members). Since some participants will certainly selfishly take advantage of this opportunity, there would be a disincentive for honest members to belong to the pool, and it would therefore quickly lose its dominance. Edit: And more generally, for the same reason, pools of this sort should cease to exist.
  - stcredzero 12y ago
    Tinfoil hat time: But not everyone will automatically comprehend the situation properly. There will be a possibility that media can be manipulated to keep the subvertible network alive and dominant through its network effect, while it is subtly manipulated from behind the scenes. Perhaps this happened before, and will happen again. (I'm talking about pre-Internet financial networks, as well as making a BSG reference. In BSG, if the Cylons were really smart, wouldn't they have taken over the financial and media networks instead of the defense computers? They would have had far more to gain from subtly controlling the wealth of the colonies instead of destroying it. Over time, they could have taken over society from the inside and just replaced everyone with attractive flashy sexbots.)
- chimeracoder 12y ago
  > Like IPv4, the "experiment" has grown so large that it may be impossible to get consensus on any non-backwards-compatible change. How is that an accurate description of IPv4 at all? IPv6 has made monumental progress[0] in a relatively short time (yes, for what we're talking about, it's only been a short amount of time). [0] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
  - npizzolato 12y ago
    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.
    - ajb 12y ago
      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/1V1MLaAEiuNI99s7NO2ZgQ7q3DPgaTkyF0dkwf2zde_4/gviz/chartiframe?oid=265198377 http://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1V1MLaAEiuNI99s7NO2ZgQ...) or the longer term trend (http://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1V1MLaAEiuNI99s7NO2ZgQ7q3DPgaTkyF0dkwf2zde_4/gviz/chartiframe?oid=254222218 http://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1V1MLaAEiuNI99s7NO2ZgQ...)
      - npizzolato 12y ago
        I can't access either of those documents. But looking at the original graph in the parent, I wouldn't be so quick to call it exponential growth. It certainly looks like it could be, but it's easy to confuse exponential growth with slightly increasing, but still fundamentally linear growth when you're only going from 0.5% to 3.5% over three years. There's no way I would look at that graph and confidently say it's going to be 20-40% in another three years when the last three have been, well, disappointing.
- deleted 12y ago
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deleted 12y ago
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imaginenore 12y ago
You can't stop pool mining, even with a hard fork. Let's say you implement a restriction like "5 blocks in a row max for a given pool". GHash can split into GhashA and GhashB, and keep going.
- jayd3e 12y ago
  Interesting. I hadn't thought about this, thanks for mentioning it.
- Afforess 12y ago
  From the article: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=309073.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=309073.0
- valarauca1 12y ago
  That wouldn't work either. Even if to make it so every 3 blocks can be rewarded to an address (let's say), then you can simply write your own wallet that will use randomized addresses and simply forward their reward to the pool's wallet, which then distributes to the "real wallets". The only way you can truly prevent pools from taking over is create a system of authentication that'll destroy anonymity.
- emin-gun-sirer 12y ago
  That's not the kind of restriction that stops pool mining. The trick is to enable the pool members to steal the blocks they discover. Andrew Miller, a grad student at UMD, has an ingenious scheme for doing this. I am pretty sure I put the link in the article, under the first bullet in the "What to Do Now" section.
  - Peaker 12y ago
    Wouldn't pool participants that use this extension to steal rewards be exposed to the pool simply due to their work being consistently challenged and thus lost? i.e: The pool would notice that certain participants contributions are conflicting with other discoveries, and ban such participants?
deleted 12y ago
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dragontamer 12y ago
A hash pool at 51% is big news. If this isn't corrected soon, BTC is doomed to fail.
- aosmith 12y ago
  You're assuming that someone with a significant investment in the space would act dishonestly. That's the only reason BTC fails as the result of something like this. Seem like MAD to me, if they were to act dishonestly they would destroy their own investment and profit potential.
  - saalweachter 12y ago
    The point of a distributed system is not having to trust people to act honestly. If you're perfectly fine trusting a GHASH to act honestly, you should be perfectly fine trusting them or some other entity to run a centralized, non-distributed currency.
    - baddox 12y ago
      Your statement doesn't work out, because even if a single official mining pool doesn't have >50% of the hash rate, a bunch of small mining pools could be secretly colluding, or even just a bunch of individual people.
  - dragontamer 12y ago
    Then why are you using BTC in the first place? The US Fed and US Government has no reason to act dishonestly. The value of the dollar relies on us trusting the US Government / US Fed to protect it. If switching over to BTC means "trusting GHash.io"... then nothing has changed.
    - freework 12y ago
      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.
a3_nm 12y ago
The article makes a pretty interesting point: Bitcoin's version of proof of work can be delegated, which makes mining pools possible. An alternative design could ensure that the task to solve is designed so that miners and pool could not trust each other, thus ensuring that pools do not exist. It seems like this is a pretty big flaw in how Bitcoin is designed, as its security relies on miners remaining independent.
- nullc 12y ago
  It's pretty easy to break delegation, but the cure is worse than the illness— to reduce mining variance there you must use hosted mining, where miners have even less control (absent more fixes…). GHash.IO is substantially hosted mining in any case. Really the more important point to note is that pooling for variance reduction has absolutely nothing to do with delegating control. Running a outbound only bitcoin full node, past initial syncup uses less than 20kbit/sec bandwith and a fraction of a percent of cpu... it's not costly to do, purposefully so. It's perfectly possible to individually run your own consensus decisions but agree with others to, in a provable way, pool your payments. This is what P2Pool does. Unfortunately many Bitcoin miners don't have a rigorous mathematical understanding of how mining works— they erroneously believe it to be a race where the fastest wins disproportionally— something entirely untrue (absent some proposed attacks which are not happening in practice)... just keeping yourself from getting scammed by the many scammy hardware companies is basically a full time job itself. Then you have various technically unsophisticated Bitcoin pundits claiming that hashpower consolidations in pools isn't something to worry about... not a great mix. Fortunately, the reasons for the current behavior are mostly inertia— if P2Pool had been invented first the symmetry would have broken differently. It's still possible that there might be a massive swing (say if GHash.io decides to steal a bunch of coins from their miners and makes a runner).
  - dperfect 12y ago
    > It's pretty easy to break delegation I'd be interested to learn how mining delegation could (in theory) be avoided. It seems to me that as long as you have a proof-of-work designed around something that can be solved with distributed computing power, there may always be incentives for delegation and cooperation (especially to reduce variance). I'm genuinely curious to hear what other approaches can be used to "break delegation."
drcode 12y ago
IANABME[1], but it seems that a solution already exists to this problem, which is to use a decentralized mining pool. The unfortunate fact is that we're in a time window right now where large miners have not yet transitioned to this ideal solution. However, any miner in the long run would prefer to join a mining pool that does not require trusting some pool operator over one that does, all other things being equal. Yes, the current situation is dangerous for the health of bitcoin, but I don't see any solution besides waiting for distributed, trustless pool technology to catch up in terms of usability with the centralized pools. This problem isn't going to be solved by a hard fork, as any "fixes" done this way are untested, incomplete, and risky. [1] I am not a bitcoin mining expert
- wmf 12y ago
  As long as large centralized pools charge no fees and use less bandwidth than p2pool, people will have no incentive to adopt p2pool.
  - drcode 12y ago
    Presumably large pools aren't charities, so the lack of fees can remain indefinitely. Bandwidth is certainly a problem though... are there any good numbers on the bandwidth difference?
JacobEdelman 12y ago
Their Bitcoin is broken argument doesn't really seem to work. I agree that something needs to be done to stop huge amounts of pooling but this seems to be too alarmist. The initial Bitcoin is Broken post is at http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/04/bitcoin-is-broken/ http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/04/bitcoin-is-broken/ and a counterpoint is at https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/bitcoin-isnt-so-broken-after-all/ https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/bitcoin-isnt-so-br... .
- travisb 12y ago
  The argument in that counterpoint seems to be as follows: 1. Assume that selfish mining doesn't work. 2. Because selfish mining doesn't work there will be fair weather miners who will only mine on whichever chain is furthest ahead, defaulting to the public chain in the case of a tie. 3. Since the selfish mining pool won't be ahead all the time nobody will mine for it. 4. Therefore selfish mining doesn't work. It's not what I'd term a strong rebuttal.
  - JacobEdelman 12y ago
    I think that the "selfish mining" in your first point isn't truly selfish mining. The idea is that the particular method of selfish mining being discussed would be defeated by a truly selfish mining method. No matter what you want to act selfishly and the debate is whether or not their is an optimal selfish strategy that is bad for the overall bitcoin infrastructure. Since little to no incentive exists to stick with a mining pool that is selfishly mining it is my understanding that that the attack using a mining pool mentioned in the previous post will not work well.
    - travisb 12y ago
      That's a valid point, but not at all what I got out of the argument. I picked up primarily on the specific counter-strategy. It's certainly true that selfish mining strategy A which gave a 5% increase in results would lose out to another selfish mining strategy B which gave 10% increases in results. However that's not an argument that strategy A doesn't break the system, merely that the optimal selfish strategy breaks the system at least badly as strategy A. Now it is possible that there isn't a stable strategy to use. If we supposed for the purposes of argument that the fair weather strategy was more profitable than the selfish strategy described in the first article you posted, then it would seem that the optimal strategy would oscillate. As more people participate in a selfish pool consistently the more profitable it is to be a fair weather miner. However, supposing that leads to a dissolution of the selfish pool all those fair weather miners turn honest. Against honest miners, however, the selfish strategy is proven to be more profitable. And so you'd see an oscillation where people constantly shift between being honest, selfish and fair weather. Of course, if the long run gains keeping up on this strategy treadmill is less than simply sticking to the selfish strategy through thick and thin, then perhaps the fair weather strategy isn't better in reality.
Lerc 12y ago
I was under the impression that the mining percentage would give you the same percentage chance to cook the books. 51% means you are more likely to succeed than fail in an attempt. Much like buying 51 percent of lottery tickets gives you a slightly better than even chance of winning the big prize. in that respect, wouldn't 51% be only marginally different to 49%. Both would be a bit of a concern, but neither would be the "position to exercise complete control over which transactions appear on the blockchain" that this article refers to. Is there some mechanism I'm missing that makes 51% be vastly more powerful than 49%?
- aosmith 12y ago
  From the bitcoin wiki: An attacker that controls more than 50% of the network's computing power can, for the time that he is in control, exclude and modify the ordering of transactions. This allows him to: Reverse transactions that he sends while he's in control. This has the potential to double-spend transactions that previously had already been seen in the block chain. Prevent some or all transactions from gaining any confirmations Prevent some or all other miners from mining any valid blocks The attacker can't: Reverse other people's transactions Prevent transactions from being sent at all (they'll show as 0/unconfirmed) Change the number of coins generated per block Create coins out of thin air Send coins that never belonged to him
  - Lerc 12y ago
    What does "in control" mean in this sense? Is that an equivalent expression to "greater than 50%"? Also the "Some or all" doesn't seem very specific. What is the factor that makes some become all?
    - jdmichal 12y ago
      I believe the intention in the phrasing is that they could selectively or universally exercise that action. Not that there is some spectrum of control.
  - im3w1l 12y ago
Havoc 12y ago
>GHash [...] just reached 51% of total network mining power today. Is this official? Seems somewhat surreal... Not really invested in this but at the very least I'd expect some posts along the lines of "Pool X is fast approaching 50%...BTC in danger". Not "51%...game over".
- supergauntlet 12y ago
  A couple days back they were at 48% or 49%. It's not that big a surprise.
uptown 12y ago
Rather than a fork, wouldn't an alternate, easier approach be to form more pools that charge no fees?
srobertson 12y ago
Another solution: assuming as the article claims that GHash grew to it's current size because it had 0% fees. Other pools can respond by lowering their fees or introduce negative ones. I.e. they pay miners to join the pool. Or have fees but introduce a lottery system that randomly overpays members.
aresant 12y ago
This article feels sensational, but I would say accurately reflects a large portion of the communities feelings. Great accompaniment is from Peter Todd (Coinkite adviser, respected dev) who announced this AM he is selling 50% of his holdings in bitcoin until this is resolved http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/281ftd/why_i_just_sold_50_of_my_bitcoins_ghashio/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/281ftd/why_i_just_s...
- c0ldfusi0nz 12y ago
  This article would be decent if they ditched the hyperbole. Like it or not, this is not Armageddon for Bitcoin - the network is still functioning as intended.
  - zheshishei 12y ago
    > the network is still functioning as intended. "as intended" reminds me of this koan from the codeless code[1]. [1]http://thecodelesscode.com/case/135 http://thecodelesscode.com/case/135
  - woah 12y ago
    Well, it's not decentralized anymore.
chrisBob 12y ago
If you really want to scare some people you should point out that this is happening as we get ready for the US Marshal BTC auction, and could be related. I would be very reluctant to put 1.5M into BTC right now.
gojomo 12y ago
This is the same panic-prone author (@el33th4xor) who, in early November 2013 with Bitcoin at about $220, wrote "@el33th4xor: You heard it here first: now is a good time to sell your Bitcoins" (https://twitter.com/el33th4xor/status/397219415025934336 https://twitter.com/el33th4xor/status/397219415025934336) This was just before releasing some research that he thought would cause a confidence collapse. (That is, his prediction was almost self-consciously attempting market-manipulation.) In fact, the paper just formalized some concerns discussed in the mining community for years. So then, rather than collapsing, Bitcoin went on an epic rally, and hasn't been below $339 since the same week of that doomsaying prediction. There is certainly danger in one entity controlling 51% of the hashing power. But everyone's known this risk, as one of the design assumptions of the system, from the beginning... and also seen the tipping point approach/recede/approach repeatedly. And also, the "Bitcoin lunatic fringe", who this author mocks, has so far been right about the pool(s) attaining such power refraining from taking destructive (and self-bankrupting) next steps. So: focused concern, yes. But @el33th4xor-style panic, no. Further, any 'hard fork' (or forks) that were to remedy pool issues, using the "well-known" techniques referenced, would almost certainly retain some continuity with prior key balances. That is: imagine the most destructive transition possible. A total civil war between mining pools. Irreconcilable dissension in the core team (or offshoots thereof). Collapse of the Bitcoin price to values of 1-2 years ago. Still, at the end of that process, there are one or more "offshoot" chains, adopting the Bitcoin history as their own, patched and stronger than before, with pre-crisis Bitcoin balances intact. (That is: a 51% cartel may not be actually "good" news... but it is survivable and perhaps even necessary.) So if you like to try to trade in and out of predicted market panics, like @el33th4xor, maybe there are some trading plays here. But if you just like cryptocurrency for the long haul, keep your Bitcoin private keys (end eyes) safe & dry, and trust evolution. There are enough smart, well-funded, and relatively cool heads involved that @el33th4xor's predictions are just a car alarm going off in the night, whether the car is actually at risk or not.
- deleted 12y ago
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- emin-gun-sirer 12y ago
  Nice ad hominems you've got there. >In fact, the paper just formalized some concerns discussed in the mining community for years. This is false. Discussed here: http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/09/no-you-dint/ http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/09/no-you-dint/ >the "Bitcoin lunatic fringe" this author mocks has been right about the pool(s) having such power refraining from destructive (and self-bankrupting) next steps. No. The Bitcoin lunatic fringe was adamant that no pool would willingly cross the 50% boundary. That just happened. Models and reasoning based on "no rational miner would do X" are clearly flawed, partly because the miners may not be rational, or partly because they are rational within a time-frame not modeled. In any case, people who reasoned like you have now been shown conclusively to have the model wrong. This is an opportunity to fix the protocol, not shill for the price, and certainly not to engage in ad hominems. Cheers.
drcode 12y ago
ELI5: Miners join in pools to mine bitcoins to even out their earnings. It's a way to diversify their risk. Unfortunately, bigger pools let you diversify the best, and this is currently undermining the core tenet of bitcoin, which is to avoid having any one person with central control over the network. The linked article is suggesting modifying the core software for bitcoin in order to discourage this kind of centralization. Other people, however, think the core software is fine, and that the solution is to instead improve "decentralized mining pool" technology to get rid of the problem.
- im3w1l 12y ago
  >bigger pools let you diversify the best According to the article the big draw is that GHash don't have a fee.
gtirloni 12y ago
And down it goes again: https://bitcoinity.org/markets https://bitcoinity.org/markets In the previous crisis it was all based on trust ("it was just a bad player, trust will return to the market"). Now we've a doomsday scenario and what seems a serious flaw in Bitcoin. Feels like a chapter out of The Foundation books.
- platz 12y ago
  or it's because the silk road bitcoins being auctioned
  - meowface 12y ago
    Or a combination of both factors. Relatively speaking, this is a pretty small dip, though.
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  If you look at the 6 month graph, this downward blip is such a small one that it's indistinguishable from noise.
Aqueous 12y ago
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, ?
- josu 12y ago
  >It's in Bitcoin community's, and GHash's, economic interest that no miner exceeds 50%. Are Bitcoin community's interests and individual miners' interests aligned? I understand why the bitcoin community wouldn't want a mining pool with more than 50% of the share, but why should "selfish" individual miners care?
  - bredren 12y ago
    Miners occupy a powerful and yet somewhat isolated portion of rapidly evolving bitcoin ecosystem. For many people in the Bitcoin ecosystem, making the technology successful is about more than personal enrichment. A lot of folks see Bitcoin specifically (because of its present success) holding the potential for big changes in a shorter period of time. The people I've spoken with don't mince words: in general serious miners compete against others to make money, not societal change.
    - eric_bullington 12y ago
      >The people I've spoken with don't mince words: in general serious miners compete against others to make money, not societal change. Fine, but in their ignorance and greed, they're going to lose their ability to make money.
  - Aqueous 12y ago
    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 crisis, the great depression, etc.... Nobody wins if the entire system breaks down.
cs702 12y ago
Why would GHash ever want to attack the platform from which it profits and from which it will likely continue to profit, as a leading transaction processor, for many years to come? Should they be silly enough to attempt something nefarious, miners would quickly abandon them, and their business would collapse overnight. Every major participant in the Bitcoin network, including GHash, has a vested interest in maintaining the network's integrity. Not only that: given Bitcoin's increased mainstream acceptance, it's in the best interest of every major participant to maintain a good reputation.
- TomGullen 12y ago
  Makes logical sense, unfortunately we've seen examples in the past of this logic not being adhered to. Take the poker site "Ultimate Bet", when cheating was suspected the line of reasoning against it (and the strongest line of reasoning at that)was "Why would they cheat when they are running a million dollar profitable business and jeopardise the entire operation for a bit more %?" Turns out they were willing to jeopardise it all.
  - Sambdala 12y ago
    In the case of Ultimate Bet it turned out that it was an inside job, but the individuals involved didn't necessarily share in the long term profits of the company, so they were able to benefit personally to the tune of millions, while most of the negative effects landed on the company rather than themselves. Thankfully in at least two other poker companies (hint: the largest one and its sister company) it was made impossible to see someone's hole cards before the hand is over, which is what allowed the cheaters at Ultimate Bet to perpetrate their con. It's my pretty firm belief that when it seems like an entity is throwing away a pretty obvious economic self-interest, there's probably just a misunderstanding of where the economic self interest lies in the parties involved.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Why would GHash ever want to attack the platform from which it profits and from which it will likely continue to profit, as a leading transaction processor, for many years to come? There's pretty much an infinite number of reasons people choose short-term profit with apparent long-term opportunity cost above what apparently stable long-term profit streams. Betting that an actor with the power to do so would never do so usually is equivalent to creating a greater incentive for them to do so.
duckingtest 12y ago
Proof of work can't be decentralized because it has almost infinite economies of scale - starting from the production of asics, and ending at mining farm cooling. It doesn't matter what you change, at the end, you're going to be left with one mining farm.
bobbygoodlatte 12y ago
A hard fork would be just as devastating as a 51% attack. The author is way over-reacting here. In fact, it looks like GHash is down to 45% and dropping — BitFury just left, and Petamine is considering leaving too: http://www.coindesk.com/bitfury-pulls-power-ghash-community-uproar/ http://www.coindesk.com/bitfury-pulls-power-ghash-community-...
- sexmonad 12y ago
  Why do BitFury and Petamine use a pool at all? At their scale, wouldn't they have low enough variance through solo mining? Or perhaps P2Pool?
moe 12y ago
In less sensational terms: The biggest pool got too big. Members (BitFury) react by shrinking it back. Community is aware of the problem, solution will probably be coming soon. Anyway, stay tuned and don't miss the next iteration of 'We are all doomed!!1' by the two muppet academics. To be published shortly after a solution gets deployed. Or earlier.
kolev 12y ago
FYI, GHash.io is a Ukrainian company. As you know, the country is a mess now and there's an ongoing civil war. Just sayin'! (See, I didn't even mention that most black hat hackers come from that part of World.)
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  The idea that most black hat hackers come from that part of the world is quite interesting. Would you expand on it?
  - kolev 12y ago
    Just stats. We know those fine computer scientists control most of the botnets, for example.
    - sillysaurus3 12y ago
      Hmm, would you link to any stats?
      - kolev 12y ago
        You can ignore what I wrote or prove me wrong by providing links. I honestly have better things to do on Friday night.
        sillysaurus3 12y ago
        ... What? How did me being curious lead to that?
        meowface 12y ago
        He probably took it as you questioning his claim as he provided no real evidence. As someone who works in the information security industry, I can confirm from personal experience that a very disproportionate amount of organized and semi-organized cybercrime comes from Ukraine, Russia, and neighboring countries. I, however, do not have any sources for you at thistime.
conroe64 12y ago
They don't have 51% anymore, although I think their other concerns are valid: http://www.coindesk.com/bitfury-pulls-power-ghash-community-uproar/ http://www.coindesk.com/bitfury-pulls-power-ghash-community-... https://blockchain.info/pools https://blockchain.info/pools
logn 12y ago
Is a "hard fork" really necessary? BTC miners can all just adopt a new version. What's concerning is that the 51% attack has been known since the beginning and the community never addressed it and seemed to irrationally dismiss it. The current response is that GHash is removing processing power, but how is that a good long-term solution? The BTC community should be demanding and supporting technical fixes. Also it's too bad that BTC is blinding everyone to a variety of other crypto-currencies that have improved features.
- meowface 12y ago
  The so-called 51% problem will be inherent in any truly decentralized P2P network. All P2P protocols suffer the risk of poisoning by malicious nodes in various different ways, and they mitigate it by assuming that proportionally, most nodes will be good. There will not be a way of "patching" the issue. The only thing that can be done is to set up a proper emergency handling procedure in the event a 51% attack is conducted, which involves directing as many clients as possible to work on a new fork.
EGreg 12y ago
Can't bitcoin simply require agreement from more than one author of a blockchain? For example do not allow the same entity to sign the blockchain for two consecutive blocks. This would require defining what constitutes a single entity though. How do we define it when talking about mining pools? Can't we have alliances of pools already have reached 51% long ago and colluded "as one strategy"?

243 points by AaronFriel 12y ago

wmf 12y ago

Like IPv4, the "experiment" has grown so large that it may be impossible to get consensus on any non-backwards-compatible change.

cdh 12y ago
I'm not sure this is true, regardless of how large Bitcoin grows to be. If a significant enough problem were discovered, wouldn't it be in everyone's best interest to protect the value of their wallets by accepting a forked blockchain?
- Zikes 12y ago
  Wouldn't GHash be able to pivot their existing mining power to take 51% of that new blockchain?
  - stcredzero 12y ago
    Depends on what changes to the algorithm are involved.
  - coolfuzion 12y ago
    An older discussion thread worth considering: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=327767.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=327767.0
  - adventured 12y ago
    Yes, the extrapolation being missed by the article, is that the rich will control bitcoin, and nothing can ever stop that from happening. It goes to the very core of how bitcoin is designed that allows for it to be dominated by a large rich entity with enough processing power. Inherently the 'little guy' will be priced out of bitcoin, it was always going to be that way. Whether it's one or ten entities in question doesn't matter, bitcoin will be dominated by rich, powerful companies or persons, and that powerful position will only increase in fortification with time. This principle pops the utopian fantasy of bitcoin that some cling to, but only a different approach to digital currencies will get you around the issue. Money & power always consolidates down to the hands of a few that will possess dramatic influence compared to the rest of the market participants. See: JP Morgan, pre-Fed.
    - jayd3e 12y ago
      That's a grim reality if true. I don't have any information that would refute this claim, so I can't disagree, and it actually makes a lot of sense.
    - wmf 12y ago
      the rich will control bitcoin, and nothing can ever stop that from happening. But should the rich have control in proportion to their richness or out of proportion to it? That's the key issue that I see behind this article (and the previous selfish mining work).
  - tempestn 12y ago
    The proposed change would allow any GHash member to essentially steal mining profits from GHash (by taking the full reward for any blocks found, while still sharing in the reward for blocks found by other members). Since some participants will certainly selfishly take advantage of this opportunity, there would be a disincentive for honest members to belong to the pool, and it would therefore quickly lose its dominance. Edit: And more generally, for the same reason, pools of this sort should cease to exist.
- stcredzero 12y ago
  Tinfoil hat time: But not everyone will automatically comprehend the situation properly. There will be a possibility that media can be manipulated to keep the subvertible network alive and dominant through its network effect, while it is subtly manipulated from behind the scenes. Perhaps this happened before, and will happen again. (I'm talking about pre-Internet financial networks, as well as making a BSG reference. In BSG, if the Cylons were really smart, wouldn't they have taken over the financial and media networks instead of the defense computers? They would have had far more to gain from subtly controlling the wealth of the colonies instead of destroying it. Over time, they could have taken over society from the inside and just replaced everyone with attractive flashy sexbots.)
chimeracoder 12y ago
> Like IPv4, the "experiment" has grown so large that it may be impossible to get consensus on any non-backwards-compatible change. How is that an accurate description of IPv4 at all? IPv6 has made monumental progress[0] in a relatively short time (yes, for what we're talking about, it's only been a short amount of time). [0] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
- npizzolato 12y ago
  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.
  - ajb 12y ago
    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/1V1MLaAEiuNI99s7NO2ZgQ7q3DPgaTkyF0dkwf2zde_4/gviz/chartiframe?oid=265198377 http://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1V1MLaAEiuNI99s7NO2ZgQ...) or the longer term trend (http://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1V1MLaAEiuNI99s7NO2ZgQ7q3DPgaTkyF0dkwf2zde_4/gviz/chartiframe?oid=254222218 http://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1V1MLaAEiuNI99s7NO2ZgQ...)
    - npizzolato 12y ago
      I can't access either of those documents. But looking at the original graph in the parent, I wouldn't be so quick to call it exponential growth. It certainly looks like it could be, but it's easy to confuse exponential growth with slightly increasing, but still fundamentally linear growth when you're only going from 0.5% to 3.5% over three years. There's no way I would look at that graph and confidently say it's going to be 20-40% in another three years when the last three have been, well, disappointing.
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imaginenore 12y ago

You can't stop pool mining, even with a hard fork. Let's say you implement a restriction like "5 blocks in a row max for a given pool". GHash can split into GhashA and GhashB, and keep going.

jayd3e 12y ago
Interesting. I hadn't thought about this, thanks for mentioning it.
Afforess 12y ago
From the article: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=309073.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=309073.0
valarauca1 12y ago
That wouldn't work either. Even if to make it so every 3 blocks can be rewarded to an address (let's say), then you can simply write your own wallet that will use randomized addresses and simply forward their reward to the pool's wallet, which then distributes to the "real wallets". The only way you can truly prevent pools from taking over is create a system of authentication that'll destroy anonymity.
emin-gun-sirer 12y ago
That's not the kind of restriction that stops pool mining. The trick is to enable the pool members to steal the blocks they discover. Andrew Miller, a grad student at UMD, has an ingenious scheme for doing this. I am pretty sure I put the link in the article, under the first bullet in the "What to Do Now" section.
- Peaker 12y ago
  Wouldn't pool participants that use this extension to steal rewards be exposed to the pool simply due to their work being consistently challenged and thus lost? i.e: The pool would notice that certain participants contributions are conflicting with other discoveries, and ban such participants?

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dragontamer 12y ago

A hash pool at 51% is big news. If this isn't corrected soon, BTC is doomed to fail.

aosmith 12y ago
You're assuming that someone with a significant investment in the space would act dishonestly. That's the only reason BTC fails as the result of something like this. Seem like MAD to me, if they were to act dishonestly they would destroy their own investment and profit potential.
- saalweachter 12y ago
  The point of a distributed system is not having to trust people to act honestly. If you're perfectly fine trusting a GHASH to act honestly, you should be perfectly fine trusting them or some other entity to run a centralized, non-distributed currency.
  - baddox 12y ago
    Your statement doesn't work out, because even if a single official mining pool doesn't have >50% of the hash rate, a bunch of small mining pools could be secretly colluding, or even just a bunch of individual people.
- dragontamer 12y ago
  Then why are you using BTC in the first place? The US Fed and US Government has no reason to act dishonestly. The value of the dollar relies on us trusting the US Government / US Fed to protect it. If switching over to BTC means "trusting GHash.io"... then nothing has changed.
  - freework 12y ago
    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.

a3_nm 12y ago

The article makes a pretty interesting point: Bitcoin's version of proof of work can be delegated, which makes mining pools possible. An alternative design could ensure that the task to solve is designed so that miners and pool could not trust each other, thus ensuring that pools do not exist. It seems like this is a pretty big flaw in how Bitcoin is designed, as its security relies on miners remaining independent.

nullc 12y ago
It's pretty easy to break delegation, but the cure is worse than the illness— to reduce mining variance there you must use hosted mining, where miners have even less control (absent more fixes…). GHash.IO is substantially hosted mining in any case. Really the more important point to note is that pooling for variance reduction has absolutely nothing to do with delegating control. Running a outbound only bitcoin full node, past initial syncup uses less than 20kbit/sec bandwith and a fraction of a percent of cpu... it's not costly to do, purposefully so. It's perfectly possible to individually run your own consensus decisions but agree with others to, in a provable way, pool your payments. This is what P2Pool does. Unfortunately many Bitcoin miners don't have a rigorous mathematical understanding of how mining works— they erroneously believe it to be a race where the fastest wins disproportionally— something entirely untrue (absent some proposed attacks which are not happening in practice)... just keeping yourself from getting scammed by the many scammy hardware companies is basically a full time job itself. Then you have various technically unsophisticated Bitcoin pundits claiming that hashpower consolidations in pools isn't something to worry about... not a great mix. Fortunately, the reasons for the current behavior are mostly inertia— if P2Pool had been invented first the symmetry would have broken differently. It's still possible that there might be a massive swing (say if GHash.io decides to steal a bunch of coins from their miners and makes a runner).
- dperfect 12y ago
  > It's pretty easy to break delegation I'd be interested to learn how mining delegation could (in theory) be avoided. It seems to me that as long as you have a proof-of-work designed around something that can be solved with distributed computing power, there may always be incentives for delegation and cooperation (especially to reduce variance). I'm genuinely curious to hear what other approaches can be used to "break delegation."

drcode 12y ago

IANABME[1], but it seems that a solution already exists to this problem, which is to use a decentralized mining pool. The unfortunate fact is that we're in a time window right now where large miners have not yet transitioned to this ideal solution. However, any miner in the long run would prefer to join a mining pool that does not require trusting some pool operator over one that does, all other things being equal. Yes, the current situation is dangerous for the health of bitcoin, but I don't see any solution besides waiting for distributed, trustless pool technology to catch up in terms of usability with the centralized pools. This problem isn't going to be solved by a hard fork, as any "fixes" done this way are untested, incomplete, and risky. [1] I am not a bitcoin mining expert

wmf 12y ago
As long as large centralized pools charge no fees and use less bandwidth than p2pool, people will have no incentive to adopt p2pool.
- drcode 12y ago
  Presumably large pools aren't charities, so the lack of fees can remain indefinitely. Bandwidth is certainly a problem though... are there any good numbers on the bandwidth difference?

JacobEdelman 12y ago

Their Bitcoin is broken argument doesn't really seem to work. I agree that something needs to be done to stop huge amounts of pooling but this seems to be too alarmist. The initial Bitcoin is Broken post is at http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/04/bitcoin-is-broken/ http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/04/bitcoin-is-broken/ and a counterpoint is at https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/bitcoin-isnt-so-broken-after-all/ https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/bitcoin-isnt-so-br... .

travisb 12y ago
The argument in that counterpoint seems to be as follows: 1. Assume that selfish mining doesn't work. 2. Because selfish mining doesn't work there will be fair weather miners who will only mine on whichever chain is furthest ahead, defaulting to the public chain in the case of a tie. 3. Since the selfish mining pool won't be ahead all the time nobody will mine for it. 4. Therefore selfish mining doesn't work. It's not what I'd term a strong rebuttal.
- JacobEdelman 12y ago
  I think that the "selfish mining" in your first point isn't truly selfish mining. The idea is that the particular method of selfish mining being discussed would be defeated by a truly selfish mining method. No matter what you want to act selfishly and the debate is whether or not their is an optimal selfish strategy that is bad for the overall bitcoin infrastructure. Since little to no incentive exists to stick with a mining pool that is selfishly mining it is my understanding that that the attack using a mining pool mentioned in the previous post will not work well.
  - travisb 12y ago
    That's a valid point, but not at all what I got out of the argument. I picked up primarily on the specific counter-strategy. It's certainly true that selfish mining strategy A which gave a 5% increase in results would lose out to another selfish mining strategy B which gave 10% increases in results. However that's not an argument that strategy A doesn't break the system, merely that the optimal selfish strategy breaks the system at least badly as strategy A. Now it is possible that there isn't a stable strategy to use. If we supposed for the purposes of argument that the fair weather strategy was more profitable than the selfish strategy described in the first article you posted, then it would seem that the optimal strategy would oscillate. As more people participate in a selfish pool consistently the more profitable it is to be a fair weather miner. However, supposing that leads to a dissolution of the selfish pool all those fair weather miners turn honest. Against honest miners, however, the selfish strategy is proven to be more profitable. And so you'd see an oscillation where people constantly shift between being honest, selfish and fair weather. Of course, if the long run gains keeping up on this strategy treadmill is less than simply sticking to the selfish strategy through thick and thin, then perhaps the fair weather strategy isn't better in reality.

Lerc 12y ago

I was under the impression that the mining percentage would give you the same percentage chance to cook the books. 51% means you are more likely to succeed than fail in an attempt. Much like buying 51 percent of lottery tickets gives you a slightly better than even chance of winning the big prize. in that respect, wouldn't 51% be only marginally different to 49%. Both would be a bit of a concern, but neither would be the "position to exercise complete control over which transactions appear on the blockchain" that this article refers to. Is there some mechanism I'm missing that makes 51% be vastly more powerful than 49%?

aosmith 12y ago
From the bitcoin wiki: An attacker that controls more than 50% of the network's computing power can, for the time that he is in control, exclude and modify the ordering of transactions. This allows him to: Reverse transactions that he sends while he's in control. This has the potential to double-spend transactions that previously had already been seen in the block chain. Prevent some or all transactions from gaining any confirmations Prevent some or all other miners from mining any valid blocks The attacker can't: Reverse other people's transactions Prevent transactions from being sent at all (they'll show as 0/unconfirmed) Change the number of coins generated per block Create coins out of thin air Send coins that never belonged to him
- Lerc 12y ago
  What does "in control" mean in this sense? Is that an equivalent expression to "greater than 50%"? Also the "Some or all" doesn't seem very specific. What is the factor that makes some become all?
  - jdmichal 12y ago
    I believe the intention in the phrasing is that they could selectively or universally exercise that action. Not that there is some spectrum of control.
- im3w1l 12y ago

Havoc 12y ago

>GHash [...] just reached 51% of total network mining power today. Is this official? Seems somewhat surreal... Not really invested in this but at the very least I'd expect some posts along the lines of "Pool X is fast approaching 50%...BTC in danger". Not "51%...game over".

supergauntlet 12y ago
A couple days back they were at 48% or 49%. It's not that big a surprise.

uptown 12y ago

Rather than a fork, wouldn't an alternate, easier approach be to form more pools that charge no fees?

srobertson 12y ago

Another solution: assuming as the article claims that GHash grew to it's current size because it had 0% fees. Other pools can respond by lowering their fees or introduce negative ones. I.e. they pay miners to join the pool. Or have fees but introduce a lottery system that randomly overpays members.

aresant 12y ago

This article feels sensational, but I would say accurately reflects a large portion of the communities feelings. Great accompaniment is from Peter Todd (Coinkite adviser, respected dev) who announced this AM he is selling 50% of his holdings in bitcoin until this is resolved http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/281ftd/why_i_just_sold_50_of_my_bitcoins_ghashio/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/281ftd/why_i_just_s...

c0ldfusi0nz 12y ago
This article would be decent if they ditched the hyperbole. Like it or not, this is not Armageddon for Bitcoin - the network is still functioning as intended.
- zheshishei 12y ago
  > the network is still functioning as intended. "as intended" reminds me of this koan from the codeless code[1]. [1]http://thecodelesscode.com/case/135 http://thecodelesscode.com/case/135
- woah 12y ago
  Well, it's not decentralized anymore.

chrisBob 12y ago

If you really want to scare some people you should point out that this is happening as we get ready for the US Marshal BTC auction, and could be related. I would be very reluctant to put 1.5M into BTC right now.

gojomo 12y ago

This is the same panic-prone author (@el33th4xor) who, in early November 2013 with Bitcoin at about $220, wrote "@el33th4xor: You heard it here first: now is a good time to sell your Bitcoins" (https://twitter.com/el33th4xor/status/397219415025934336 https://twitter.com/el33th4xor/status/397219415025934336) This was just before releasing some research that he thought would cause a confidence collapse. (That is, his prediction was almost self-consciously attempting market-manipulation.) In fact, the paper just formalized some concerns discussed in the mining community for years. So then, rather than collapsing, Bitcoin went on an epic rally, and hasn't been below $339 since the same week of that doomsaying prediction. There is certainly danger in one entity controlling 51% of the hashing power. But everyone's known this risk, as one of the design assumptions of the system, from the beginning... and also seen the tipping point approach/recede/approach repeatedly. And also, the "Bitcoin lunatic fringe", who this author mocks, has so far been right about the pool(s) attaining such power refraining from taking destructive (and self-bankrupting) next steps. So: focused concern, yes. But @el33th4xor-style panic, no. Further, any 'hard fork' (or forks) that were to remedy pool issues, using the "well-known" techniques referenced, would almost certainly retain some continuity with prior key balances. That is: imagine the most destructive transition possible. A total civil war between mining pools. Irreconcilable dissension in the core team (or offshoots thereof). Collapse of the Bitcoin price to values of 1-2 years ago. Still, at the end of that process, there are one or more "offshoot" chains, adopting the Bitcoin history as their own, patched and stronger than before, with pre-crisis Bitcoin balances intact. (That is: a 51% cartel may not be actually "good" news... but it is survivable and perhaps even necessary.) So if you like to try to trade in and out of predicted market panics, like @el33th4xor, maybe there are some trading plays here. But if you just like cryptocurrency for the long haul, keep your Bitcoin private keys (end eyes) safe & dry, and trust evolution. There are enough smart, well-funded, and relatively cool heads involved that @el33th4xor's predictions are just a car alarm going off in the night, whether the car is actually at risk or not.

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emin-gun-sirer 12y ago
Nice ad hominems you've got there. >In fact, the paper just formalized some concerns discussed in the mining community for years. This is false. Discussed here: http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/09/no-you-dint/ http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/09/no-you-dint/ >the "Bitcoin lunatic fringe" this author mocks has been right about the pool(s) having such power refraining from destructive (and self-bankrupting) next steps. No. The Bitcoin lunatic fringe was adamant that no pool would willingly cross the 50% boundary. That just happened. Models and reasoning based on "no rational miner would do X" are clearly flawed, partly because the miners may not be rational, or partly because they are rational within a time-frame not modeled. In any case, people who reasoned like you have now been shown conclusively to have the model wrong. This is an opportunity to fix the protocol, not shill for the price, and certainly not to engage in ad hominems. Cheers.

drcode 12y ago

ELI5: Miners join in pools to mine bitcoins to even out their earnings. It's a way to diversify their risk. Unfortunately, bigger pools let you diversify the best, and this is currently undermining the core tenet of bitcoin, which is to avoid having any one person with central control over the network. The linked article is suggesting modifying the core software for bitcoin in order to discourage this kind of centralization. Other people, however, think the core software is fine, and that the solution is to instead improve "decentralized mining pool" technology to get rid of the problem.

im3w1l 12y ago
>bigger pools let you diversify the best According to the article the big draw is that GHash don't have a fee.

gtirloni 12y ago

And down it goes again: https://bitcoinity.org/markets https://bitcoinity.org/markets In the previous crisis it was all based on trust ("it was just a bad player, trust will return to the market"). Now we've a doomsday scenario and what seems a serious flaw in Bitcoin. Feels like a chapter out of The Foundation books.

platz 12y ago
or it's because the silk road bitcoins being auctioned
- meowface 12y ago
  Or a combination of both factors. Relatively speaking, this is a pretty small dip, though.
sillysaurus3 12y ago
If you look at the 6 month graph, this downward blip is such a small one that it's indistinguishable from noise.

Aqueous 12y ago

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, ?

josu 12y ago
>It's in Bitcoin community's, and GHash's, economic interest that no miner exceeds 50%. Are Bitcoin community's interests and individual miners' interests aligned? I understand why the bitcoin community wouldn't want a mining pool with more than 50% of the share, but why should "selfish" individual miners care?
- bredren 12y ago
  Miners occupy a powerful and yet somewhat isolated portion of rapidly evolving bitcoin ecosystem. For many people in the Bitcoin ecosystem, making the technology successful is about more than personal enrichment. A lot of folks see Bitcoin specifically (because of its present success) holding the potential for big changes in a shorter period of time. The people I've spoken with don't mince words: in general serious miners compete against others to make money, not societal change.
  - eric_bullington 12y ago
    >The people I've spoken with don't mince words: in general serious miners compete against others to make money, not societal change. Fine, but in their ignorance and greed, they're going to lose their ability to make money.
- Aqueous 12y ago
  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 crisis, the great depression, etc.... Nobody wins if the entire system breaks down.

cs702 12y ago

Why would GHash ever want to attack the platform from which it profits and from which it will likely continue to profit, as a leading transaction processor, for many years to come? Should they be silly enough to attempt something nefarious, miners would quickly abandon them, and their business would collapse overnight. Every major participant in the Bitcoin network, including GHash, has a vested interest in maintaining the network's integrity. Not only that: given Bitcoin's increased mainstream acceptance, it's in the best interest of every major participant to maintain a good reputation.

TomGullen 12y ago
Makes logical sense, unfortunately we've seen examples in the past of this logic not being adhered to. Take the poker site "Ultimate Bet", when cheating was suspected the line of reasoning against it (and the strongest line of reasoning at that)was "Why would they cheat when they are running a million dollar profitable business and jeopardise the entire operation for a bit more %?" Turns out they were willing to jeopardise it all.
- Sambdala 12y ago
  In the case of Ultimate Bet it turned out that it was an inside job, but the individuals involved didn't necessarily share in the long term profits of the company, so they were able to benefit personally to the tune of millions, while most of the negative effects landed on the company rather than themselves. Thankfully in at least two other poker companies (hint: the largest one and its sister company) it was made impossible to see someone's hole cards before the hand is over, which is what allowed the cheaters at Ultimate Bet to perpetrate their con. It's my pretty firm belief that when it seems like an entity is throwing away a pretty obvious economic self-interest, there's probably just a misunderstanding of where the economic self interest lies in the parties involved.
dragonwriter 12y ago
> Why would GHash ever want to attack the platform from which it profits and from which it will likely continue to profit, as a leading transaction processor, for many years to come? There's pretty much an infinite number of reasons people choose short-term profit with apparent long-term opportunity cost above what apparently stable long-term profit streams. Betting that an actor with the power to do so would never do so usually is equivalent to creating a greater incentive for them to do so.

duckingtest 12y ago

Proof of work can't be decentralized because it has almost infinite economies of scale - starting from the production of asics, and ending at mining farm cooling. It doesn't matter what you change, at the end, you're going to be left with one mining farm.

bobbygoodlatte 12y ago

A hard fork would be just as devastating as a 51% attack. The author is way over-reacting here. In fact, it looks like GHash is down to 45% and dropping — BitFury just left, and Petamine is considering leaving too: http://www.coindesk.com/bitfury-pulls-power-ghash-community-uproar/ http://www.coindesk.com/bitfury-pulls-power-ghash-community-...

sexmonad 12y ago
Why do BitFury and Petamine use a pool at all? At their scale, wouldn't they have low enough variance through solo mining? Or perhaps P2Pool?

moe 12y ago

In less sensational terms: The biggest pool got too big. Members (BitFury) react by shrinking it back. Community is aware of the problem, solution will probably be coming soon. Anyway, stay tuned and don't miss the next iteration of 'We are all doomed!!1' by the two muppet academics. To be published shortly after a solution gets deployed. Or earlier.

kolev 12y ago

FYI, GHash.io is a Ukrainian company. As you know, the country is a mess now and there's an ongoing civil war. Just sayin'! (See, I didn't even mention that most black hat hackers come from that part of World.)

sillysaurus3 12y ago
The idea that most black hat hackers come from that part of the world is quite interesting. Would you expand on it?
- kolev 12y ago
  Just stats. We know those fine computer scientists control most of the botnets, for example.
  - sillysaurus3 12y ago
    Hmm, would you link to any stats?
    - kolev 12y ago
      You can ignore what I wrote or prove me wrong by providing links. I honestly have better things to do on Friday night.
      - sillysaurus3 12y ago
        ... What? How did me being curious lead to that?
        meowface 12y ago
        He probably took it as you questioning his claim as he provided no real evidence. As someone who works in the information security industry, I can confirm from personal experience that a very disproportionate amount of organized and semi-organized cybercrime comes from Ukraine, Russia, and neighboring countries. I, however, do not have any sources for you at thistime.

conroe64 12y ago

They don't have 51% anymore, although I think their other concerns are valid: http://www.coindesk.com/bitfury-pulls-power-ghash-community-uproar/ http://www.coindesk.com/bitfury-pulls-power-ghash-community-... https://blockchain.info/pools https://blockchain.info/pools

logn 12y ago

Is a "hard fork" really necessary? BTC miners can all just adopt a new version. What's concerning is that the 51% attack has been known since the beginning and the community never addressed it and seemed to irrationally dismiss it. The current response is that GHash is removing processing power, but how is that a good long-term solution? The BTC community should be demanding and supporting technical fixes. Also it's too bad that BTC is blinding everyone to a variety of other crypto-currencies that have improved features.

meowface 12y ago
The so-called 51% problem will be inherent in any truly decentralized P2P network. All P2P protocols suffer the risk of poisoning by malicious nodes in various different ways, and they mitigate it by assuming that proportionally, most nodes will be good. There will not be a way of "patching" the issue. The only thing that can be done is to set up a proper emergency handling procedure in the event a 51% attack is conducted, which involves directing as many clients as possible to work on a new fork.

EGreg 12y ago

Can't bitcoin simply require agreement from more than one author of a blockchain? For example do not allow the same entity to sign the blockchain for two consecutive blocks. This would require defining what constitutes a single entity though. How do we define it when talking about mining pools? Can't we have alliances of pools already have reached 51% long ago and colluded "as one strategy"?