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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, s

• bunderbunder 12y ago
  Maybe they were. . . or maybe they've figured out something others haven't. Some sort of shorting-type scheme, perhaps. Normally I'm not so inclined toward conspiracist thinking, but considering all the different capers that have put Bitcoin in the news over the past couple years, in this particular case I'm inclined to make an exception.
• dllthomas 12y ago
  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 could mean more profit than the could be mined out of those rigs. Of course, you would need someone to take the other side of that bet, in a setting with sufficiently little counterparty risk that you can collect (which typically means a more regulated setting) and a sufficiently lax regulatory environment that you aren't likely to be accused of some illegal type of market manipulation. That said, people do seem to overlook such details... and this all only seems unlikely to very unlikely, not impossibly or absudly unlikely.
  • Aqueous 12y ago
    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.
    • dllthomas 12y ago
      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.
      • bunderbunder 12y ago
        Perhaps the deeper threat here is the rate at which the goalpost is moving. 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.
      • Aqueous 12y ago
        Large contributors to the GHash pool pulled large amounts of resources out of the pool. GHash isn't a monolithic entity. Miners have to voluntarily commit their resources to GHash. It's not like a single individual can commandeer the entire mining army without fear of repercussion.
  • hollerith 12y ago
    >they are long bitcoin call options denominated in energy You mean, "denominated in energy divided by global hashing power (of all miners collectively)".
    • dllthomas 12y ago
      Yes, believe I do.