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Largest Bitcoin Mining Pool Pledges Not To Execute '51% Attack'
An anonymous reader writes "Bitcoin transactions are confirmed by performing complex calculations, also known as 'mining.' If a single mining pool gains 51% of the overall computational power in the network, various forms of transaction manipulation become possible. Only a few years into Bitcoin's existence, this existential threat appears to be at hand, with Bitcoin mining pool ghash.io approaching 51% of mining power. ghash.io has now assured the Bitcoin community in a press release (PDF): 'GHash.IO does not have any intentions to execute a 51% attack, as it will do serious damage to the Bitcoin community, of which we are a part.' But can a network relying on such assurances survive in the long run?"
Add more compute power to a different pool.
The Military should launch a premptive attack on them, to prevent it.
Ideally, miners should be responsible and move to another pool to avoid the 51% attack possibility. Being part of a possible exploit when shit hits the fan will hurt their bottom line more than being part of the biggest pool will gain them
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
^^^^^^^
They can't act much worse than the traditional large financial institutions. Not sure how this makes bitcoin that much less reliable than stocks, the US dollar or the EURO
...I will Do No Evil(tm).
Laws and pledges will inevitably be broken inversely proportional to the enforcement and proportional to the benefits of breaking your word and how many people are involved. So Bitcoin is good, no one involved is trying to make money for nothing.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
"But can a network relying on such assurances survive in the long run?"
No, but it can rely on the fact that the damage any such attack would do to Bitcoin would definitely not be in any mining pools interest. It's not even a prisoner's dillema, it's just bad all round.
At least that is the theory. But we all know that there is no control for the control... thus we are back to trust. But since its about money and there is no guarantee that a third party can get involved which may force the farm into exploiding the 51% attack it will only solve this issue by not having 51% of the overall computational power. This means, either giving up on at least 1% atm or helping other farms reaching a higher computational share.
Libertarian currency in "falls into monopoly" shock.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
double and triple spending the same coins
Let me get this straight. In order to use Bitcoins, I don't have to trust any government ... but I *do* have to trust a group of random people on the Internet who have a massive stake in the market and say they would never manipulate that market.
Choose your poison, I guess.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
So many Bitcoin stories. This one asks questions like,
"Can we trust them?!?"
"Are these assurances enough!?!"
Same answer to both: "Who cares anymore?!?"
All this is possible if we look at the fact that the US dollar for many years has been the 'de facto' international currency. The assurance that the US government provides is not even given to the wider community but to its populace, and that is, it will not do random crap with the value of the dollar. In a similar but very limited way economic stability can be maintained with the Bitcoin currency if the dominant player honors their assurance. However, and this is a big however, business is business and if executing the 51% attack is in the best interest (long term) of the GHash.IO, you had better believe that all type of funky will happen to Bitcoin. What's that interest? Who knows, an exit strategy, portfolio diversification, personal or political views, survival in the face of an existential blackmail threat and so on and so forth.
what's to stop a central bank or government with unlimited funds (and that sees cryptocurrency as a threat) from deliberately buying up mining capacity and doing it themselves?
NSA.io, sorry, Ghash.io, now owns Bitcoin.
Game over.
"[E]conomies always depend on you dealing with other people, some of whom will benefit from screwing you"
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
In order to use any of the current breed of crypto-coins, I think you have to trust quite a few "random people on the Internet" anyway?
For starters, you have to put some trust in whoever developed the coin you're using -- because let's face it. The entire thing is just a piece of software that someone wrote. Did the developer pre-mine a bunch of coins that he/she is hoarding up secretly, waiting for everyone else to "establish" the coin as a viable currency, only to dump all of it in the future and crash the market -- walking away with the loot? Is there some sort of "back door" designed into a particular crypto-coin so the developer has a way to "cheat" and obtain coins more quickly than everyone else, bypassing the usual rules for mining one?
You have to put a lot of trust in the people running the currency exchanges. These places typically want you to transfer (sometimes relatively large) sums of crypto into wallets maintained on their servers, just so you can conduct a trade with that money. THEN, you have to further trust that they'll properly handle any withdrawal requests you make.
To a lesser extent, anyone in ANY mining pool has to put trust in the pool operator. While sure, most competent pools provide all sorts of statistics so you can see how your returns are being calculated and what they estimate your "hash rate" is? It's not out of the realm of possibility that one of these places could "skim off the top" by shorting you just a tiny little bit of hash rate that you wouldn't even notice. Multiplied by all of the miners using the pool, though, it amounts to a lot of CPU time the owner could be redirecting towards coins mined into his own personal wallet someplace?
If you want to talk about trusting government instead? Now you're talking about a very small group of elite, powerful individuals who call all the shots for a given currency. There's no "moving mining to another pool" if you don't trust the first one here.
So yeah, it really is a "choose your poison" situation -- but IMO, my own government has proven itself shady, not at all trustworthy, and relatively inept at accomplishing stated goals in a timely manner and under budget. By contrast, the people running the mining pools and exchanges I've used are still more of an "unknown" - but ones who so far, appear to have treated me fairly. So I know which one I'd rather place trust in right now.
No, but it can rely on the fact that the damage any such attack would do to Bitcoin would definitely not be in any mining pools interest. It's not even a prisoner's dillema, it's just bad all round.
True - if that miner wanted a long-term relationship. If they wanted to manipulate the price then cash out and fly on their pre-booked tickets to Majorca then maybe not so much. Because that's never happened before.
They love bitcoin and insist that unregulated free markets produce the best possible outcome. In reality, we know that eventually in free markets through collusions, mergers, and cartels a small number of players will eventually emerge that can control the entire market. So now the value of their bitcoin investment is in the hands of what GHash.io decides to do, even if they promise to not be evil. This is the exact opposite of the anarcho libertarian paradise of what bitcoin was portrayed to be.
The problem here is that mining these days requires custom ASICs made to compute the double SHA-256 used by Bitcoin as the proof of work, CPUs and GPUs just don't cut it. ghash.io is the pool attached to the larger manufacturer of them, and as its always more profitable to mine using your ASICs than sell them, you can't just buy a bunch for anywhere near the cost price and mine yourself.
Solving this will require someone to make and sell the mining hardware at near the cost price instead of using it themselves. They may lose a bit of profit but in the long run the network will be better off.
Come as you are, do what you must, be who you will.
Bitcoin Magazine has a good article on this subject: Mining Pool Centralization At Crisis Levels. It also suggests a number of solutions.
The primary solution is for miners to switch to a peer-to-peer mining pool. In these the control is decentralized, just like the Bitcoin network itself. Even if such a pool hits 51% market share, it will not be able to actually block or reverse transactions, since the mining pool is decentralized and so its power is vested in the network as a whole.
I don't have strong feelings about Bitcoin either way, but as I understand it some folks support Bitcoin because it isn't controlled by a central bank or government.
Except it seems that one large mining pool -- or a consortium of smaller ones seeming independent but in truth acting together -- can game the system in certain ways. In short, controlling it. And given that large sums of money are on the line already, is Bitcoin really that different from any other currency?
Koans and fables for the software engineer
Doing this would mean diverting funds from their other evil plans^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hinvestment opportunities.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
But can a network relying on such assurances survive in the long run?
Are there other networks we use that rely on such assurances? ICANN comes to mind.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Coinye is the crypto currency of our generation!
All the new super-secret stuff is now being done by the*ack**gack*NO CARRIER
You are assuming that the miners are in for making money from Bitcoin. However, what if the group that gets 51% actually has a different goal? For example, imagine a government wanted to destroy Bitcoin, for whatever reason. Then they could, with government money, put up a giant mining pool (and with government resources they might even be able to hide the fact that it is a pool instead of many independent miners, and certainly that the government is involved), get 51% and then do random attacks.
Ha-ha-ha... That was quick
Or possibly this:
1. Find (or create through other agents) an index fund tied to the value of BTC.
2. Short BTC.
3. Use your mining pool's 51% position to compromise the BTC network, driving participant confidence (and hence value down).
4. Profit.
Illegal? Oh, probably. That doesn't seem to dissuade people.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
But can a network relying on such assurances survive in the long run?
Answer: NO!
And, here comes the bear trap that any sane person knew was coming for this unregulated currency. Regulations will have to be put in place, which means govts will have to get involved in order for it to survive, and that has been the central reason why I and many others have remained skeptical and completely wary of this cryptocurrency from the beginning. Markets don't self regulate. It's a lie, a myth and history has already demonstrated numerous times that when there's money involved there's corruption involved. Take away any sane regulations and you have a major ripoff in the making. I am never going to deal in BitCoins, ever. Won't have any, won't take any. Give me money backed by a central reserve bank, thank you very much. Take your unregulated, make believe currency somewhere else.
P.S. It is make believe because it only has value to those who use and accept it. That it shares with real currency, except BitCoin is backed by dubious sources, at best. Again, no thanks. My $0.02/£0.02/€0.02.
GHash.IO does not have any intentions to execute a 51% attack
Yeah, and that Level 18 stronghold on Game of War: Fire Age promised not to attack me either. I don't need to tell you how that worked out.
How on earth do you short BTC?
It's not like BTC is currently traded by brokers and I don't know anybody who is selling BTC future contracts.
If you know a way to do this, let me know.. There is serious $$ to be made here.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I still have no idea why they are even a thing.
There should be one and only one. And it should be decentralized so NOBODY can control it.
The whole idea of mining pools annoys me.
It is such a retarded system.
Yea, it wouldn't take that much $$ to pretty much sink BTC, at least from the perspective of a government that borrows 1 Trillion a year. Once you sink BTC, you can hand the assets over to the NSA for breaking crypto or take on some other crypto currency.
Seriously, I don't think the government cares about BTC, at least while you don't use it to break the law (not reporting income, laundering money etc).
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
There is very clear evidence that ghash.io ALREADY used their hashing power to execute a double-spend attack on the network (at less than 50% hashing power):
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=327767.60
I wouldn't trust them an inch. Now the question is whether Bitcoiners are the same kind of sheeple that believe in the good intentions of governments. With ghash.io being a part of the new government of the Bitcoin world.
I have the impression the miners are stupid enough to not care, to not switch, and Bitcoin will come crashing down when the next round of attacks happen due to this.
I put it in as Step 1: Find (or create through other agents) an index fund tied to the value of BTC.
Yeah, overly simplistic I know, but the OP said that it wouldn't be in any mining pool's interest to devalue Bitcoin, so my mind went to a scenario where that mining pool first converts its entire BTC holdings to something like USD, then wagers heavily with those USD that BTC will crash, then crashes BTC. Profit.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
This is addressed by the newspaper headline embedded in the genesis block. There's no conceivable way to embed that headline in advance. Any block that doesn't ultimately link back to the genesis block is invalid, so it doesn't matter how many blocks he previously created.
First, the client is Open Source, so you can study the code to make sure that it really follows the protocol. If you want to be completely sure, you can also write your own client. Moreover, the protocol is open for inspection as well, so you can convince yourself that it works as described. Remains the cryptography used. But that is just standard cryptography, therefore the only way he could exploit it is if he had found a weakness in those standard algorithms (and frankly, if he did, the Bitcoins should be the least of your worry).
That way mining wouldn't be a lottery like now but instead some kind of wage labor. This might be crazytalk.
"Usually interest on debt is higher than inflation, so that doesn't work."
Honestly. Think about it. Where does money come from. What happens when you pay a debt? So where does the money come from to pay the debt? Therefore there must be how much money in the future to pay the interest and debt combined?
Therefore inflation *must* what?
We have put a plan in place to see that 51% of all hashing power, will not be maintained by Ghash.IO by executing the following actions
- We will temporarily stop accepting new independent mining facilities to the Ghash.IO pool.
- We will implement a feature, allowing CEX.IO users to mine bitcoins from other pools. So when they purchase GH/s they can put it towards any pool they choose.
So they are actively trying to prevent 51% monopolization of the network, not just asking us to trust them.
If you're really concerned you could use a distributed pool. Which is probably what everyone should be doing anyways.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
So "profit" step is pretty much not going to happen because the first step is not going to happen.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Over 55% of GHash.io hashpower is miners who have chosen to mine on that pool voluntarily, because it is currently in their best interest to do so. If ghash.io starts to use it's hashpower for nefarious purposes, those miners will certainly no longer perceive mining on ghash.io to be in their best interest, and will take their hashpower elsewhere. Having 51% of the network hashpower makes it theoretically possible to do bad things, but actually doing those bad things would certainly result in losing a large part of that hashpower, thus negating the threat. It's just like US democracy. Being the party in power gives you the theoretical power to do evil, but if the voters find out that you are doing evil, you probably won't have that power for long. What am I missing here?
If ASICs were available to anyone, the price of bitcoins would be capped by the price of electricity (+ some investment costs for the hardware). Of course, it would be capped by the lowest price of electricity anywhere, so mining would become unprofitable for most current miners. It would be interesting to see what happens then.
How long until someone starts using bitcoin mining instead of storage for temporary overproduction of solar power?
How on earth do you short BTC?
It's not like BTC is currently traded by brokers and I don't know anybody who is selling BTC future contracts.
If you know a way to do this, let me know.. There is serious $$ to be made here.
bitfinex.com
Why would it be worse, than the traditional fiat-money systems? Where the government prints — and spends — melting out people's savings...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Or...not.
So yeah, it really is a "choose your poison" situation -- but IMO, my own government has proven itself shady, not at all trustworthy, and relatively inept at accomplishing stated goals in a timely manner and under budget. By contrast, the people running the mining pools and exchanges I've used are still more of an "unknown" - but ones who so far, appear to have treated me fairly. So I know which one I'd rather place trust in right now.
To do a currency transaction? How about, umm, use cash? That is, in the actual government currency?
I don't know what country you live, so I don't know your government. Nevertheless, it's increasingly difficult to live by cash alone, but as long as you aren't doing huge transactions, in most countries it's still possible to do most of your business in cash, i.e., the "government endorsed" currency.
For most government currencies, at least in the short term, using cash means something that has relatively stable value. Even with craziness like the NSA scandals, I doubt most governments are really trying to track ALL cash transactions -- unless you're doing something illegal and/or using large amounts of bills, probably not as much to worry about.
I don't put a lot of faith in my government to always do the right thing. But if my choice is "get green piece of paper -- hand it to person I'm paying" vs. "depend on whole networks of unknown internet folks to not manipulate the currency or the various sets of transactions I have to go through to get the money to the person I'm pay in any way"... well, I know which I'd choose.
If you were only talking about electronic transactions to remote people (requiring credit cards, wire transfers, whatever), perhaps we can have an argument. But unless your country is going through some sort of major political or economic upheaval (in which case, probably any currency and any transactions are going to be problematic), the ease of transaction for cash is hard to beat in terms of reliability.
Promises aren't worth shit unless you're willing to put them in writing.
What I find most interesting about this is that this is an open system, a transparent community that is bring issues to light. In current financial systems, individuals, small groups or institutions control vast sums of the monetary flow with little or no transparency. If bitcoin does fail, at least we know why unlike how we are left guessing with so many other monetary systems.
I like this new world we live in....
A thought experiment, nothing more. But I almost never say never about anything. All we're really talking about is wagering. If I want to bet US$1000 that BTC will decrease in value, all I need to do is find someone who is willing to bet US$1000 that it won't.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
At some point, Bitcoin will have to compete against 2nd generation currencies that do not have this flaw.
You don't need a single pool to reach majority, this attack is possible if multiple smaller pools collude together. The higher the value of bitcoin is the higher chance that something like this will happen.
Yes sir, that`s why I believe bitcoin will fail sooner or later. I wish I am mistaken but I do believe at some point it will burst into zeros and ones. However, I am sure this will be the future but until something solid and trustful stands behind there is no way. I mean look, even RSA had dirty hands.
Ghash.io's press release indicates that they have some ideas on where they want Bitcoin to go. They now have enoug power to force changes in the system.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This souncs a lot like the too big to fail issue with our financial systems dependence on the sound judgement and intentions of banks. This banking problem arose when glass-stegal's repeal essentially deregualted banks and let them manage their own affairs.
But acutally it harkens back much further. In the early days of the US there was no common currency. banks issued their own script and this failed when the banks manipulated it. Later on after we had a common currency, we still had too much exposure to bank mismangement. The federal reserve was not sufficient. And of course we all know about the depression.
Bit coin lacks this sort of regulation. A bit coin "bank" does not have a federal reserve rate to assure that the money supply doesn't mulitply. And it has no regulation on too big to fail for these mining consortia.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
To exceed the magical 51% and what havoc could be wrought by one who did?
In 30 years, the most profitable company in the world will be General Bitcoin. They will have developed their own nuclear reactors and designed their own computing technologies in order to be the very last organisation able to generate bitcoins, slowly but surely, one at a time. Huge amount of resources, beyond those available to most countries, will be spend in order to slowly grow the amount of bitcoins available. What a fantastic utopia we have here.
Why would anyone keep mining in a pool which is attacking the network? Pool operators (or whoever hacks them) might want a quick buck, but anyone who has spent thousands of dollars on a piece of hardware (that MIGHT pay for itself after months) will probably want to recoup their investment.
Current estimated cost to sink BTC with a 51% attack: http://www.coinometrics.com/bitcoin/brix 1.9 billion as of this moment. Additionally, companies who sell Asic Mining hardware have self interest in the long-term strength of Bitcoin so deliberately distribute the equipment to as many different individuals as possible in the order queue. If a state wanted to create a 51% attack they would more likely have to create a foundry and produce their chips themselves and doing so covertly would be difficult.
Don't Be Evil. *waits 3 years* - ok fuck it , execute a 51% !!!!!!
The pool members don't even know what the transactions are except in the stratum protocol where the client can adjust a counter on a single transaction that gives them the ability to hash more with less interaction with the pool servers. The pool clients do not see the transaction histories being incorporated into the block. As such the pool client will mine what ever block the controllers of the pool want and have no visibility into the transactions aside from possibly the generation transaction which is always a payment to the pool.
Ok so basically, the pool miners are designed specifically without any controls to prevent the pool operator from cheating? Nice. As I already mentioned in a previous post, that is ridiculous since it would be trivial to set it up such that the individual clients could (if they wanted to), double check to be sure they were mining for a legitimate and not a cheating pool.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Is this like cornering the market on a commodity like silver or gold? While gash.io may be "close" to cornering it, won't it become extremely expensive to actually acquire the 51% necessary to corner the market as others jump into the market as the value of the mining computers rise? I understand they don't have 51% of the bitcoins and are just approaching 51% of the cryptographic network but it seems that action has economic consequences that would make it extremely difficult to realize like Gould's attempt to corner gold in 1869 or the Hunt's run at silver in the 70's and 80's?
I'm not in the BtC mining, but I can see how it really drops the requirements on the client - full fledged miner would need, for a start, more free disk space to hold the blockchain (~13Gb and growing), bigger pipe to the Web and faster CPU.
So instead of big, expensive, noisy and electricity wasting solo mining PC, you could get a teeny-tiny RaspPi or alike to simply get commands from the pool and drive your army of ASIC miners (and use the savings to buy an extra miner).
they would more likely have to create a foundry and produce their chips themselves and doing so covertly would be difficult.
I'm positive that they easily could if they wanted. They've prototyped, flight tested, build and deployed whole squadrons of stealth aircraft without much evidence in the public domain, if they wanted to do this, they could.
But the real question is, *why* would they want to? I don't think they care.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
1.9 billion? It's like, what, 5-10% of NSA budget? Doesn't seem too unreachable, especially if Big Finance decides Bitcoin is inconveniencing them and lends some help.
To do it covertly, they'll need some more money to make the miners FPGA-based - they are already using those for high-frequency trading, so it's won't be suspicious and they've got pros to work on miners' design.
Would it not do more for the community they claim to be supporting if they were to cap their membership at 50% (allowing their current proportion to rebalance by attrition or as the rest of the network continues to grow) thus preventing anyone ELSE from doing it as well?
Perfectly Normal Industries
For starters, you have to put some trust in whoever developed the coin you're using -- because let's face it. The entire thing is just a piece of software that someone wrote.
It's a piece of open source software everyone wherein anyone who's not a brain donor can verify it invalidates caches of "pre-mined" coins by extending the bit length of the proof of work, and requiring other miners to verify said block-chain. Like any investment endeavor early investors typically wind up with more profits. Might as well not use the stock market either if this is your concern -- I mean, you just described the IPO of Facebook or any web/software company.
Instead of the barrier to entry caused by the stock market's low proof of work (transaction) that requires one to trade at or better speeds than high frequency traders, with Bitcoin you at least have a chance of solving the proof of work proportionate to how much hardware you throw at the problem -- even if it's far less than what others have. Too bad the stock market doesn't work like bitcoin.
They've prototyped, flight tested, build and deployed whole squadrons of stealth aircraft without much evidence in the public domain, if they wanted to do this, they could.
Many of the Bitcoin users are anarchists and libertarians, or in other words some of the most paranoid crowd around. It doesn't take many leaks or information for this crowd to freak out and start taking steps to protect the network if any rumor gets out. The government cannot keep much of a secret anymore as evidenced by wikileaks.
But the real question is, *why* would they want to? I don't think they care.
I think you are right. Bitcoin is insignificant and a joke in most of their eyes. This is good news for bitcoin as the network stability and security needs a few more years to mature without outside intervention to insure its current growth rate. At this stage its unlikely to be stopped by anyone but it certainly can be slowed.
You are making that mistake of thinking it was deliberately designed as an electronic currency with rigorous mechanisms and not a pyramid scheme with a false front to make it bait for geeks and gold bug libertarians.
Changing the number won't help.
How many malware miners would have to be pointed at a pool to get 75%? After that they move on to the next one. How much could be done when most of the bitcoin scheme participants are asleep?
Only far far more so by careful design. In fact so much so that the analogy doesn't hold up at all. See other pyramid schemes for a better thing to compare it to.
There's lot's of people that call themselves libertarians. There's the outright anarchists as you've described and then there's the ones that would like those with old money to rule - a new feudal system with new Royalty backed by the gold standard. For some reason those new Royalists like to take George Washington's name in vain despite opposing nearly everything he stood for.
Then there's people in the middle or off on other tangents who have nothing at all to do with such views. (Put in bold so the thin skinned won't reply the second they see the word anarchist). So many people call themselves libertarian that it's nothing but a self granted label that's supposed to make the person use it think they are a proud champion of liberty - even if they call for the death of Snowden, Manning etc whose acts were exactly what some libertarians were calling for.
So there's no point making fun of libertarians. Every barb or compliment will apply somewhere. Agrarian socialists, fascists, royalists, anarchists and even democratic socialists that just hate the idea of Federal over State - they are all in there.
Sure but you could still retain the option of double checking with a local PC that you are working on a legitimate block. Such checking wouldn't even have to be mandatory, if even a small but random population of miners in a pool bothered to check, it would make cheating by the operator much harder.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Did the developer pre-mine a bunch of coins that he/she is hoarding up secretly, waiting for everyone else to "establish" the coin as a viable currency, only to dump all of it in the future and crash the market -- walking away with the loot?
This is addressed by the newspaper headline embedded in the genesis block. There's no conceivable way to embed that headline in advance. Any block that doesn't ultimately link back to the genesis block is invalid, so it doesn't matter how many blocks he previously created.
Actually, this is very serious the issue.
Early bitcoin mining was fast, cheap, and generated lots of bitcoin for very little effort.
If bitcoin had died, that would have been wasted. ... extremely large amounts of potential wealth horded by a very small group of early adopters, and the people who came up with this in the first place are the earliest adopters.
Instead, it's
Instead of people who inherited, or who can manipulate the dollar, the political behavior, the banking industry, etc, gaining all the money, it's now the people who manipulate others into saying "Hey, this new currency is better" who are gaining all the money.
Either way, it's inherently biased and unfair. It's not based on the work you do / what you contribute, it's based on what you started with; who/what you knew/did early.
Yep, you're right:
https://www.bitfinex.com/pages/howitworks
I guess it was only a matter of time. :-)
Koans and fables for the software engineer
...to just stay right the fuck away from shitcoin.