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.
Could you point me to where i said this, because I can't find it myself.... You are accusing me of something, please provide proof.
and if you don't because you can't because i never said this you are slanderous. do you know what false accusations and slander mean?
also your lack of backing up what you previously attacked me for like not answering any of my questions but just throwing more accusations around is really embarrasing not only to yourself but the everyone who has to read it, and certainly me who has to defend himself against your FUD.
Speculation and rumor become problematic when people are encouraged to act on it.
Coming from you that is comedy gold. You throw around accusations against me and when i try to talk about them you ignore it at move forward with new speculations. Just trolling at max speed.