In the words of the great Encyclopedia Galactica: DON'T PANIC
Did the "possible 51% attack" originate form a regular mining pool? I somehow doubt that. Prematurely blaming regular pools is IMO a bad move and definitely not good Karma. Isn't it much more likely that the attack was coming from an external actor, rather than the existing Karma mining community? What if it is related to the 1.5+ GH/s Nethash that were unaccounted for last week? Was it even an attack on the regular network or rather aimed at Mintpal directly? I'd like to see some facts before we rush to conclusions and point fingers.
If it was indeed a 51% attack, it is pretty much the scenario I and others were warning about in April. Because of the new ASICs several GH/s of mining power are suddenly at the whim of a few select people. Moving our existing hashrate to P2Pools doesn't protect from that. P2Pool is a tiny piece in the puzzle of securing the network at best.
Another piece would be if the community and/or LLC joined the game and secured the network by aquiring additional mining power, either through renting rigs or purchasing ASICs. This was already suggested as an idea on the Karmashares forums IIRC.
In the interest of not getting this whole mining/algo/PoS discussion started again, I'll just shut up now. The team will work it out, I trust them to do whatever is best for Karma.
This is me speaking for self.
No one is blaming anyone as we don't have proof on who did what. But there has been speculation among a few of us that there is the possibility of a shadow pool or pools who are modifying their front ends to show one thing yet combining hash power in the back or have a private pool made up of huge hash power rigs that is working hidden to the public. Again we don't have any tangible proof on who is or is not doing this, however I will challenge you to look up all the pools you can find and then add up their hashrate. You will find that their is currently close to 1.5-2gh of net hash that is unaccounted for. And i think you would be foolish to think there are that many people solo mining. While asking people to mine at a p2pool is not a fix all it does put us one step forward in an attempt to spread the hash rate instead of having it all focused in one place. Hell for all we know you could be unknowing hashing away at a pool that is feeding this type of attack without you even having a clue. In the end to each is their own, if you switch to a p2pool or not that is up to you. But at least it was put out there on what could be happening and its up to you if you wish to react or not. The health of Karma and its security is very important the Karma Team and rest assured they are looking into doing what they can to make sure Karma remains secure for years to come.
As I said, I have full faith in the team and am not worried at all.
Nobody has named anyone, but as a regular here I couldn't help but notice some bad Karma in the air concerning certain pools lately. Then this rumored attack takes place and suddenly everyone writes and tweets "OMG switch to P2Pool now". Didn't really feel right to me. Disclaimer: I personally do not mine anymore . I've always liked P2Pools though, so I would switch if the high electricity cost and the sharp drop in profitability hadn't forced me to dismantle my rigs.
IMO it most likely is an unknown/hidden pool. Heard about the Synology NAS mining malware that mined the creator 500 Million Dogecoin? He/She/They set up a private pool for that purpose and went unnoticed for months. Not saying that's happening here. But if you were - uhm lets say an industrial scale miner and sat on a fat and juicy Scrypt-Farm with a few hundred MH/s or even GH/s - would you mine in a public pool and pay fees to some stranger, or would you just set up your own, non-public, pool?
In both their posts they have attempted to get people to switch to their pool with the enticement of rewards and zero fees. It matters not what their intentions are - they are holding themselves out as promoting a pool through the use of negative speculation and baseless accusations.
This is simply not true. You are talking about me. I have asked multipool-eu's questions about why the operator would let 92% of the hash reside at them while still maintaining the idea they are "helping karma". they have not engaged in discussion about this at all, just full on ignore.
you can read my previous posts about pools. i have been a proponent of leaving multipool-eu on the list of pools and i have also requested people mine at ANY pool that had few miners. i am for full disclosure.
besides trying to thwart 51% on the karma blockchain for a while by adding a p2pool to the ecosystem i also stepped up and am running our blockexplorer when the prevoius one went down.
i also hosts a couple of wallets online so people can bootstrap onto the blockchain because the seed nodes have all been pulled be the previous devs.
i am not sure why you are attacking me. 51% attacks are very very serious, just look at all the cex fallout regarding bitcoin and their 12 hour streak.
i really really dislike your tone and insinuations. i'll get back to you with the posts where i actively ask people to use any pool and the posts regarding questions about multipools motives but i have a life so not right now.
anyway... that is all for now, i'll get back to you with post links.
Firstly, I limit my criticism to those posts in question - whoever they were made by.
Secondly, The theoretical potential for an attack is not justification for posting that one may or may not have happened and enticing people to use a certain pool - as was the case yesterday.
If it can be shown that there was verifiable evidence to justify the posts made then that would be a start. However, as I said earlier, this thread is usually the first port of call for many people who just want to get an idea of what a coin stands for and its future as perceived by the community. Knowing this, it is simply a bad idea to make posts in the nature of those that were made yesterday.
Concerns that have the potential to cause panic among the unwary should be brought to the attention of the developer privately, where the dev team can discuss them and come up with a solution if one is so required. There are ways of dealing with concerns - and I stand by what I have said; the way in which the concerns were publicly aired yesterday was not appropriate.
Speculation and rumor become problematic when people are encouraged to act on it.
Ok I am not going to explain everything that happened in detail, but I will point out a few key points in order to help you not continue to sound foolish.
First we were contacted by MintPal that an attack happened (for me when a major exchange contacts you direct that pretty much is all the proof I need that something might have happened). Second this happened at midnight USA Central time so there were but a few team members on that could discuss what course of action was needed to be taken (yes Kosmost was one of them). While it would have been easy to sweep this attack under the rug as some might have in order to not possibly affect their coin price, we decided to put our community first and our coin price second. We are running a coin with honor and integrity so we decided to let the public know as soon as possible just in case they wanted to move their coins out of exchanges until the smoke cleared. While we were fortunate that this was but a minor attack we did not know that at the time and had to work with the info we had which was minimal. The last thing we wanted is to hold on to time sensitive information and then have our community pay the price by not having early warning. So after some discussion we decided on what we thought was the best course of action and as a result Kosmost asked me to post the warning. As for asking people to switch to p2pools, well I already addressed why in earlier posts so I am not going to repeat myself. And no it was not to get people to join any one pool. If your read my post correctly I asked miners to switch to a p2pool of their choice. In time of crisis leaders have to make split second decisions on immediate courses of action in order to minimize damage not just to their coin but to the people that support their coin and make it what it is. The KarmaTeam is made up of honorable hard working individuals that bust their butts on a daily bases to get us one step closer to achieving our vision for Karma and the Karmashares LLC. If you can't handle investing in a coin that is driven by a team with honor and integrity and that puts its community before their bottom line then maybe you would feel more comfortable investing in redcoin, mooncoin or pandacoin instead.