Slush's pool AND Deepbit are both getting hit big-time, repeatedly, with Distributed Denial of Service attacks!
What gives?
1. target ~65% of aggregate mining pool with hired zomB net DDoS
2. Continue to mine your own 20-50 Ghash minifarm solo
3. Increase personal likelihood of mining whole blocks by factor of 1000
4. Profit
Nope ...
I just realized though.. removing all that hashing from the pool wouldn't reduce the diff.rate (immediately) so your personal odds of mining a block don't actually change.. I think you'd have to effectively remove a shit-ton of hashing power for an extended period of time and get the diff.rate to go back down for this to be an effective attack vector..
Math isn't necessarily my strong suit. Someone smarter than me please comment.
Correct. Mining isn't a race. Other people finding (or not finding) blocks doesn't affect your odds in any way. In the long run, if you manage to knock out significant mining capacity for a long period of time, then you can affect the difficulty level, which so long as your own mining isn't affected, does mean you will end up mining more in the long run. However, targeting pools is not a good way to do this, because the individual miners will simply hop between pools as one goes down and you won't affect the hashing rate for very long at all (not long enough to have a big long term effect).