Yup.

I agree, but by saying he left you really mean that he is just not using his nick name, I am sure he is still around and visit this forum and daily post under another nick name

oh I see now

Hmm... there is a lot of speculation and misinformation in here as well as some good facts.

I think if we break it all down. People are worried that this pool is dishonest because of the double spend "attack" which I agree is not good. However, in perspective I do mine at Ghash.io and contrary to what others have said you can easily cash out BTC. I know that I have personally cashed out a ton of BTC with no difficulty. It is as simple and withdrawing BTC or setting up an "investor" with an external wallet and 100% payout. The pool fee is 0% as stated and indeed they have had some problems with orphaned blocks and at time there have been some minor issues where solved blocks did not pay out properly. However on those solved blocks not paying out... each and every time they were paid once the issue was resolved. As for support they appear to have an very adequate staff because each and every ticket I have opened has been resolved within an hours time.

There is also confusion in this thread about how CEX.io Ghash.io operates. They do not sell the hashing power that is pointed to the pool. With that regard the pool operates just like any other. The CEX.io component allows users to buy hashing power along the lines of cloud hashing. The hashing power they sell is... as someone else pointed out... essentially a share of hardware they own/control. You pay a % fee taken at the time blocks are paid. This is how they make money and cover costs. While I obviously don't have access to their financials I am sure they are making pretty good money... just like many other pools where they charge a pool fee etc. All in all I really think that they are probably a profitable enterprise.

As a business owner myself I have to throw my perspective out there that I just can not come to a conclusion that they would be a "dishonest" pool looking perform some 51% attack or any other attack as it would ruin the hard work and effort they have obviously put into the business. This is not to mention that they would also have to have other pools join in for the 51% attack that people are in fear of.

The best solution overall to large pools and the fears of things becoming centralized is though competition. I have used several pools throughout my mining history as I am sure many people have. I have come to point most of my gear at Ghash.io because I like the added benefit of being able to add hashing power on demand. The ability to easily get hashing power is also contributing to the growth of this pool. As others said above new miners looking to get into the game can get started with fairly low barriers to entry. This directly leads to pool growth because many of those new miners are also buying equipment. It would be a logical assumption that any of these new miners with physical equipment will eventually point their gear to Ghash.io. They currently have what I would consider a major competitive advantage over other pools. There are two ways to temper this growth: 1.) Through competition for miners or 2.) Discredit them so that they are forced to go away. I wonder if that is the reason for this thread? To slander them out of existance.

All in all when reading the original post and subsequent replies I can't help but get the feeling that the initial post by the OP is more of a "witch hunt" than anything else and all the posts I see about scams and dishonest pools etc are really starting to scare me as a proponent of BitCoin. There was another thread about what people think is the biggest threat to Bit Coin. When I read that post I did not have an answer but now only a few hours later I do.

I think the Bit Coin community is the biggest threat to Bit Coin. Each and every day there are posts screaming SCAM here and Scam there. While I am not oblivious to the fact that there are scams occurring I think the vast majority of the claims are unwarranted. The more we cry foul as a bit coin community with conjecture and un-substantiated claims the less reliable and attractive the Bit Coin network becomes to the world. The more we cry scam and foul play the more attention we garner from Governments, Law Enforcement, and Media looking for a scandal. When the negative attention reaches a certain threshold we can expect massive government attention and regulation.

My advice is that we temper our claims of foul play across the board and keep unsubstantiated claims out of the discussions. Be vigilant to look into possible abuse but do so in such a manner that we don't permanatly mar the reputation of Bit Coin. If we want total Bit Coin adoption we can not be slinging mud in the streets as conventional banking institutions look down from their skyward offices as they laugh all the way to the bank knowing that we are going to implode without any additional effort on their part.

No, with 29% hashpower a double spending attack would have a 60% success rate on confirmed transactions. The fact that the success rate isn't 100% would just mean that they'd need their profits when successful to be at least 17 BTC in order to make up for the cost of a lost block (less if they don't have to pay their miners for orphans).
 

This is a flaw of a decentralized currency powered by democracy. The following is a nice video on explaining the implications of this effect:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo

In essence, those who are worrying about a single pool getting to 51% (i.e. "first past the post") will go to the second largest pool, instead to the smaller ones. Essentially only two pools will be left.

Same with the two-party system in America.

I remember mining at P2pool as well, but the problem at the time was dust, I would pay crazy fees for transactions, although I was looking at P2pool and the Litecoin Devs with the Bitcoin devs were giving funds to make a better software that solves many of the problems, I don't know how is it today with P2Pool since I stopped mining a long time ago but I think this problem is solved.

Hint: you can still use P2pool even if the dust issue still exist,  the key to reduce this problem is to use coin control, you simply take all inputs to one transaction and pay the fee only once, this is what I was doing...

and P2Pool is the only solution for decentralized mining so I don't know if miners understand that and at least give it a try !

If only two pools are left, then definitely one of them will cross the 51% mark and the other one will be decimated.

I would add, simply, that this is an explanation for two parties emerging in a system of winner-take-all elections.  It doesn't apply to mining because it's not winner take all.  With smaller pools, and individual miner simply gets bigger shares of less-frequent blocks.