Sorry, I've been known to both fat-finger and
Bitcointalk while drunk.
I meant 38 gigahash, it's still a huge amount by just one person reselling FPGAs. And keep in mind he had two sets of over 100 each and at one point linked some of us (via email) to his actual sales stats on accident (it was over 400 Icarus boards on just batch 3).
Evidence please?
We all know Artforz has, in the past, mined without including transactions and was kind enough -- when he was GPU mining over 50% of the blocks for a short while -- to include them again once he figured out how to. Also, he had between 50-100 gigahash at his immediate disposal when he was active in the alt currencies forum, and all-the-while he was still mining BTC while crushing alt-currencies (though luke-jr proved he was better at it). Art's been absent, and probably very busy if this is actually him. No, I don't have hard evidence, but he's been gone for months at a time before (last summer through the fall, for example, and always comes back with larger and larger gigahash at his disposal).
But should we even care? No!
You guys really are freaking out about nothing. The Chinese New Year ended and the FPGA manufacturers all shipped out their units, then someone comes online with about 20% of the network and after a difficulty increase only has around 15%. Here soon with the scores of FPGAs going online and possible sASIC devices being sent, it really is a wonder that we haven't seen these kinds of increases sooner, especially after it bounced off the $2 mark. Someone clearly liquidated any remaining GPUs and struck a deal with a large financier to mine with FPGA or custom ASIC.
I've mentioned several times that a few million spent to own 20-40% of the Bitcoin network is chump change for a small country or medium sized bank. Hell, the CIA venture capital fund could own 15% of the Bitcoin network in a lead time of less than 6 months and probably has the qualified staff either within their own walls or in the NSA to operate this. And you think an intelligence organization that has knowingly engaged in illegal markets in the past is just going to sit and overlook an opportunity to own part of the biggest electronic black market?
I guess my point is that this seems to be a pretty small issue and diminishing. Even assuming it was the world's largest botnet, it's only going to be profitable a short while longer. I'd recommend ignoring this, especially after the next two difficulty increases. If a miner ever gets to the point where they have 50%, the entire Bitcoin network becomes untrustworthy to actually use, so the price will plummet and the whole thing will be worthless to use, meaning the miner will have wasted their time. Whoever it is has no incentive to tell us who they are, nor reach 50%, they'll mine at pools to hide that they have so much computing power so as to preserve the price of their coin.
TLDR;Everything's going to be alright.
