Quote from: Pursuer on April 20, 2018, 06:31:14 AM

Quote from: mocacinno on April 20, 2018, 06:26:28 AM

I remember back in ~2015, one of the bigger mining farms was rumoured to have >50% of the hashrate, and even then, it wasn't catastropic...

it wasn't a mining farm it was a mining pool called Ghash and it was lots of individual miners (and also their own hashrate) that were connected to that pool, when the article about the risk of 51% attack was published and these individual miners saw the possible ~~threat~~ drama they simply switched to other pools and their total hashrate dropped.

Your memory is better than mine, thanks for the correction

But even so, there was a point where this pool *could* have executed a 51% attack using their miner's hardware (without them knowing), but (obviously) they didn't... My main point is that even if a pool/farm controlls >50% of the hashrate, it is seldom in their own best intrest to attack the network. Those pools/farms are heavily invested in BTC, and an attack (and the following price drops because of the bad press) would probably hurt them a lot more than the BTC they would have stolen by remining some of the last blocks.