That GHash.IO had come to control the majority of mining power was brought to light in a blog post by two researchers at Cornell last Friday. One of them, postdoctoral researcher Ittay Eyal, told MIT Technology Review that the Bitcoin protocol should be updated to prevent mining pools from being able to amass so much computing power.
Gavin Andresen, chief scientist for the Bitcoin Foundation and previously core maintainer of the Bitcoin code, has long warned that mining has become too centralized. In a blog post reacting to concerns about GHash.IO, he cautioned, “Bitcoin is still a work in progress, and you should only risk time or money on it that you can afford to lose.”
Nonetheless, many people and companies are heavily invested in the cryptocurrency. CoinDesk reported last week that some $113.2 million has been invested in bitcoin companies in 2014 alone.
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