No, he should just increase the fees further.  He's already the most expensive and still the biggest— even if you make some downtime argument— 2% fee pays for 28 minutes/day in downtime— and deepbit has not been perfectly reliable either. I bet he could take 15% and still be at a third. 0_o

Win win.


The security concerns don't require the operators of the pool to be evil. They could be compromised, for example. And there have already been pool security compromises.

Adding to the security paranoia arguments the system reliability argument: If a pool has 50% of the hashrate and it goes down, then we lose 50% of our transaction processing capacity.  This would especially be bad in difficulty-cycles where hashrate had shrunk so that we were already behind 10 minutes block.

This.

People obviously think there is extra value in his pool, so he should capitalize on that and let the free market do what it does best.  Some would leave, some would stay, he would probably end up making MORE bitcoins/hr than he is now, and the bitcoin community would be more secure because of it.

Majority of those invalid blocks were caused by outage, so we're still talking about this one issue before two weeks.

Yup, that would help.

And, thats what I'm looking for right now.
This way, I can start my own mining pool with friends and such.

The pool's site was unavailable for a few seconds - I was installing HTTPS/SSL support :) Done now.

Pushpool is nice, but it's not a complete solution. For instance, there's no front end to provide a web interface and manage workers and payouts.

Just make a bounty and I'll happily build one.

The idea is that the motivation isn't economic.

The idea is that it can happen for any reason, and it can happen much easier if the main prerequisite for the attack is already in place: one person controlling >50% of the network.

The idea is that it doesn't necessarily even have to be the pool operator that does the attack.

The idea is that trust in Bitcoin, and thus the value of Bitcoins, will be lost because of the attack.

The idea is that it is in the best interests of everyone who mines Bitcoins to voluntarily keep the network healthy in order to prevent the possibility of such an attack from occurring in the first place.

It would be interesting if there could be a technological solution to this problem. Until then, it's up to the miners to keep the network healthy for their own good. Also, an attack from a collusion of 50 pools is much more difficult than an attack from 1 pool. The more decentralized the network is, the more secure it becomes.