Gold demand getting out of hand in India. CB going to dump some

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-03/india%E2%80%99s-central-bank-sell-gold-market-exchange-gold-bank-england

Block interval tends less than 10 minutes, so 7/sec is pretty close to our average limit.

I really think there should be something done to limit pools to a Maximum of 20% - I've no idea how this would work, as I am ignorant of mining..
(i tried it out in the early days, but left it as my GPU wasn't suitable, couldn't afford a good one at the time)

Anyway.. perhaps even some sort of general agreement between the pools, or something in the protocol that won't recognise pools if they go over 25%
They get a warning at 20% and have time to take action to avoid reaching 25%
Or that pools won't accept extra hash if they reach 20%

Would be better for all.. At least i think it would but i'm sure there are issues that i'm not thinking about.

EDIT: There is nothing stopping an organisation having 2 pools at 20% = centralization by a different name, but at least there would be no danger of a 51% attack.

At least there is no hard limit. There seems to be a soft limit depending on the network bandwidth of single nodes, though. If a single node has not enough bandwidth to download the next block within 10 minutes, it can't catch up with the blockchain. E.g. a typical private residential internet connection has about 2 MB/s (?) receiving bandwidth. When blocksize is larger than 2 MB/s * 10 * 60 s = 1200 MB, home nodes can't download the blocks in time and will be left behind. Luckily it's the receiving speed that is relevant here, which is a lot faster than sending speed on the typical home internet line.


The danger of attacks possible by controling more than 50% of hash power are still there, even if a single organization decides to operate 2 pools. The organization simply has to coordinate the attacks across both its pools.
I think having one organization operating 2 pools is even worse than having one organization operating one pool. More so, if it's not known by the public, that both pools belong to the single organization. The real danger is hidden in this case, which is worse, than a danger the public knows about.

So right now with ghash at 37%, you'd have to assume Discus, at 15%, was owned or influenced by ghash.  That's pretty far fetched.

I found it interesting to read the comments of the ghash owner who said that pulling a  double spend is actually quite difficult from an  internal technical stand point.

I  wonder what he was talking about?  

Quoted because this is important yet often ignored.

It's impossible to secure against all possible non-economically driven attacks.

At the extreme end of the spectrum, the US military could defeat Bitcoin by using nuclear weapons to end all human life on the planet.
At the other end of the spectrum, there is an adversary who is willing to lose a maximum of 1 Satoshi in order to attack the network.

Somewhere between those two extremes there's a boundary between the attacks which we can successfully defend against, and the attacks we shouldn't even bother defending against.

likewise with Litecoin: