Quote from: DeathAndTaxes on June 13, 2014, 05:01:38 PM

Quote from: windpath on June 13, 2014, 04:48:58 PM

Quote from: Marlo Stanfield on June 13, 2014, 04:32:33 PM

I'm not sure how these replies relate to the theft of shares from the link I posted. How does Ghash have anything to do with it (other than me throwing my speculative question related to their involvement)?

The 51% thing is a big deal but I wanted to talk about the fact that there seems to be a critical flaw with the way mining pools currently work that people can exploit(not >50% attacks, read my original link). The 200-300 BTC that the pool lost is a lot. What really makes me worry is that people can do it on p2pool and no one can stop them as far as I can tell. And we want people using p2pool but no one is going to want to if it's being exploited.

This is not a sensible attack on p2pool, the only way to do it would be to withhold a p2pool share that would currently solve a block, the withholding party would NOT get the block reward, but neither would the pool, on p2pool it would essentially just be throwing away the block solution and no one would benefit...

That is no different than any other pool. The point of the attack is to pay a little to hurt the pool more. If an attacker makes up 10% of the pool they can take a 10% reduction in mining income to make the pool look horrible (consistent 10% or worse "bad luck"). This would drive miners into "luckier" pools and possibly kill the pool off completely. So rhetorical question, who directly benefits if a smaller pool (to include p2pool) is wiped out?

At least with Ghash they can't really gain much any longer from people moving to their pool at this point since they've already breached 50%. I mean they could, but at this point I have to assume they're not stupid enough to continue pushing their numbers in to the 50s. At least publicly.

Perhaps they did this before and it has paid off for them in the form of more people going to their pool. And now we're seeing these record numbers partially as a result of this attack? Maybe it worked too well?