Hey man thanks for opening up this thread.
I am really concerned right now and probably not the only one after reading the thread about the doublespends and whatnots. We need to get more attention to this topic at all costs. Also please ensure to get official statements by cex to this. I will email the support right after posting this. Post it on the forums, mail it to them and show that we as a network do not accept centralization. The whole mining on other pools stuff just makes it impossible to trace the the hashing power of cex.io in total. It is necessary to gain transparency because that is the only way to ensure this currency and plattform that bitcoin is can succeed in the long run.

Labcoin 2.0 is upon us and maybe people didnt see the signs last time but this time we as a network have to do better. People with deep knowledge about the network itself and also the financial aspects of this have to come up with a solution and if cex doesnt react, we have to find a constructive way of getting the power back to the people. Even with the next gen miners this is almost impossible because people pay mad prices for the ghashes on cex right now and I don't see how we can put an end to this because of the moneydriven greed people that think that they miss out today if they dont buy while they dont see that they ruin themself in the near future if they blow away all their money right now to make cex take over the network tomorrow. Please wake up people. Realize how this network works and don't give away your precious coins to people centralizing what was meant to be free and decentralized.

back in the day, when such things occurred, miners tried and did convince other miners to switch to other pools for greater good of bitcoin.

this really is not enough. I don't want to have to trust them. That release really translates to "we will continue to expand up to 50%" if you read it right.

I understand your point, but i wouldn't make this noise if i didn't watch btce trollbox and marketmovement very closely today. Yes, if they decrease now in power i will shut up. If they further expand this talk will not stop, but intensify and also take prices down. Of course. Don't speculate on the ignorance of others. Only small fries get burned here. Large holders are in most cases familiar with the inner workings of btc and they will dump on you when they see btc-network is centralized.
Maybe majority of holders is ignorant, but the largest stashes are not ignorant at all. They wouldn't be the largest stashes otherwise. When the top 10% holders dump this party is over. No matter what the average Joe knows or cares about. I don't want to be alamist. But it is better to have this talk now than later. I sincerely hope this is not an issue anymore in a few weeks. But as of today all of the talk about this issue has actually driven down prices. Ghash.io already affected the value of btc in a negative way. It happend today. This is to be taken serious. I hate it to sit on exchange all day with the triggerfinger ready to sell. I really don't want to trade like that.

Everybody was hoping and talking about 2k$ per btc. I really can't see it hit 2k$ anymore with this situation.

i think if the news of overstock-implementation didn't come out today we could already be at the 700-range.

Are the identities of the owners of ghash.io known? I suspect they operate as anoynmous as everybody else in this environment. (I could be wrong since i didn't do an in-depth research about them) Anonymous players are not trustworthy at all. Why should they be? It could be just about anybody operating those pools.

I do think the same way, it's not in their interest to reach 51%.

if ghash.io is private persons or companies that are in for the profit there is not much to worry, i agree. But we don't know that.

edit:
i just checked the stats again and they lost another 2% and are now at 38%. Let's hope this thread becomes obsolete soon.

Fuck them and Fuck anyone who ever used them

Plot twist: They ARE the bitcoin dev team.

Pooling can't be limited or banned because there is no admissions control on mining. Everyone can mine without asking permission, and if it were otherwise it would be a point of centralization.
There is, P2Pool, which is a fully decentralized mining pool based on the same technology as Bitcoin. Unfortunately a lot of miners operated under an incorrect understanding of mining where they believe their income is proportional to the size of the pool that they are on based under a misunderstanding of mining as a race instead of as a poisson process and so they try to mine at the biggest pool. As a result we've seen a continual churn where a large pool gets a lucky run and appears larger than it is on some charts and then people flock over and it bloats up, then people freak out.

The fact of the matter is that "51%" is hardly more concerning than 40%. If a party controlling 40% hashpower tries, they'll successfully reverse 6 confirms 50% of the time. That someone could control so much hashpower by compromising a single party or system is thoroughly outside of our security model, even if it isn't quite "51%".

In any case P2Pool suffers for four reasons: (0) It's moderately small, so none of the people who misunderstand mining as a race will use it. (1) It's poorly misunderstood and frequently hit with FUD: people saying it has poor income (actually no, its all time income is 107% of expectation) or high orphans (actually, in the last several months it has had something like 0.1% orphans, an order of magnitude below other pools) (2) it takes more effort to setup, you have to run a Bitcoin node with it, (3) it takes more resources to run—  there are people with tens of thousands of dollars of mining gear running it off a crappy flaky raspberry pi— it makes no sense, but thats how it is P2pool needs a reasonably competent (e.g. strong laptop or a desktop machine) hosting the miners to really work well.

Related to (3) is that P2Pool has no snazzy marketing or slick webpage. There are other pools with pool-fee income over half a million dollars per month that can afford some snazzy UI work, but P2Pool is a volunteer open source work funded by donations when its funded at all.

There are _other_ ways to to do more decentralized mining.  The GBT protocol offered by Eligius and a few other pools was intended as a start for making the classical centralized pooling models more decentralized but it has not been widely adopted. If it were you could have things like miners generating their own work and only using a centralized (and potentially distributed) pool to coordinate sharing payouts... but there is basically no active work on that right now.