Re: [Bitcoin-development] A mining pool at 46%

2013-04-08 Thread Daryl Tucker
BTC Guild's response: 51% Mitigation Plan I want to start by thanking all users, new and old, for making BTC Guild become what it is today. I never expected a service that originally started on a mining PC in my dining room in April 2011 to go this far. However, recently BTC Guild has started

[Bitcoin-development] A mining pool at 46%

2013-04-05 Thread Melvin Carvalho
There was some chat on IRC about a mining pool reaching 46% http://blockchain.info/pools What's the risk of a 51% attack. I suggested that the pool itself is decentralized so you could not launch one On IRC people were saying that the pool owner gets to choose what goes in the block Surely

Re: [Bitcoin-development] A mining pool at 46%

2013-04-05 Thread Mike Hearn
51% isn't a magic number - it's possible to do double spends against confirmed transactions before that. If Michael wanted to do so, with the current setup he could, and that's obviously rather different to how Satoshi envisioned mining working. However, you're somewhat right in the sense that

Re: [Bitcoin-development] A mining pool at 46%

2013-04-05 Thread Gregory Maxwell
On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 2:30 AM, Melvin Carvalho melvincarva...@gmail.com wrote: There was some chat on IRC about a mining pool reaching 46% http://blockchain.info/pools The estimates on there may be a bit lossy. What's the risk of a 51% attack. The whole fixation on 51 as a magic number is a

Re: [Bitcoin-development] A mining pool at 46%

2013-04-05 Thread Gregory Maxwell
On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 2:48 AM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: but I think p2pool still has a lot of problems dealing with FPGA/ASIC hardware and it hasn't been growing for a long time. As an aside and a clarification— P2pool works great with FPGAs, and one of the largest FPGA farms I've

Re: [Bitcoin-development] A mining pool at 46%

2013-04-05 Thread Robert McKay
On Fri, 5 Apr 2013 11:48:51 +0200, Mike Hearn wrote: However, youre somewhat right in the sense that its a self-defeating attack. If the pool owner went bad, he could pull it off once, but the act of doing so would leave a permanent record and many of the people mining on his pool would

Re: [Bitcoin-development] A mining pool at 46%

2013-04-05 Thread Peter Todd
On Fri, Apr 05, 2013 at 12:13:23PM +0200, Melvin Carvalho wrote: Totally see the logic of this, and it makes sense. But I dont think the only risk is in terms of double spend, but rather 1) vandalize the block chain which may be difficult to unwind? Vandalize the chain how? By delibrately