The post Everything in Bitcoin is decentralized — except the blocks appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

This is a segment from the Supply Shock newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe. Eleven years ago to the day, the Bitcoin space was grappling with the ballooning hash rate of one massively popular mining pool: Ghash.io. Ghash, which was owned by CEX.io (an exchange still operating today) was widely considered the best mining pool in 2014. It had automatic payouts and ultra-low fees, and it even shared transaction fees with the entire pool, whereas others tended to keep those for themselves. There was also clear and responsive tooling for tracking hash rates and incomes, and it supported more merge-mined coins than any other pool. Users could even trade hash rate and mining contracts via the CEX.io platform. One problem: Ghash was attracting too many miners. “The people behind GHash are to mining as Mark Zuckerberg is to social networking,” one Reddit user wrote. “If there wasn’t a 50% concern they would have over 90% of the pooled network by now I’m sure.” Users on Bitcointalk had been sounding the alarm. “GHash is at 48% WTF. This is fucking serious people get off GHash the consequences for 51% are huge. It could be detrimental for bitcoin going forward. Once people realize that the Achilles heel in bitcoin is real, they’ll permanently mark it with a negative stigma.” Discus Fish, the second-most powerful pool at the time, only had 11% of the total hash rate.  “Bitcoin pirates with their DDOS botnets” is a great name for a punk band. It was also the second time in six months that Ghash’s popularity had become an issue. After gathering 42% of the hash rate, the pool released a memo stating it would restrict registrations for new miners and pledged to help its existing users diversify into other pools. Many miners exited Ghash, dropping…

---

Filed under: News - @ June 11, 2025 5:27 pm