Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Surely this isn't a 51% attack on bitcoins, right?
by
MoonShadow
on 12/10/2011, 21:59:27 UTC
Guys.  

the 'OTHER"  is obviously the downed pools hashing power.  everybody is still mining with them, it is just the front end that wont answer http calls.

No everyone isn't mining.

Many users of deepbit report connectivity issues and none of my miners can connect to slush.  It looks like some miners may still be able to connect but not all of them are.

Still other isn't necessarily bad.  My slush rigs switched to solo so they would be "other" too.

DOSing the major pools isn't what I think of as a "51% attack", but whatever.  Whether or not the pools are under attack or not is of little concern to myself.  The overall security of the network is not really under threat, since 10 Terahashes per second isn't a mark reachable by any known network or supercomputer.  This does highlight the risks to the bitcoin network at large associated with pool mining.  Concentrating the mining to a single server for the purpose of income stability also creates central points of failure/attack.  I don't mine in pools for this exact reason, and don't think anyone with any substantial hashing ability should do so.  10K small lights are harder to shoot out than a dozen really big ones.