[Cryptography] ghash.io hits 50% of the Bitcoin compute power

CodesInChaos codesinchaos at gmail.com
Fri Jun 13 15:44:06 EDT 2014


What kind of mining protocol does this pool use?

* The pool builds the block, decides on the transactions etc. The
miners are just dumb nonce incrementing slaves (modulo whatever tricks
are used nowadays to work around 32 bit nonces efficiently).
* The miners gather transactions and build blocks by themselves. The
pool pays them for work if it's the target of the coinbase
transaction.

While such a large pool is problematic in either case, it's much more
severe with the former protocol compared to the latter protocol.


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