Interview with CEX.io's Jeffrey Smith on Why They Paused Mining and the Future of the Industry
In a less than graceful tweet, Jeffrey Smith, the CIO of CEX.io, announced that the company would be pausing mining for its users. Instantly, the internet erupted. Accusations were thrown around, of course, and many wondered out loud if this was the beginning of the end for cloud mining companies like CEX. Their more thorough blog post—which included, among other things, that users are able to turn their hashes back on—received less attention. Of course, accusations continue, and there really isn't anyone who can prove anything either way. Smith tells me that CEX has no hardware of their....
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Here at CCN, I was able to talk with Jeffrey Smith of Cex.io and ask him a few questions about cex.io and ghash.io. For those readers that are unfamiliar with the Cex.io/Ghash.io websites, they provide simple access to mining power of any size for end users around the world. With Cex.io, users can purchase GH/s on a freely floating hash for Bitcoin exchange. Ghash.io is the mining pool that rented equipment from Cex.io is pointed towards, many other miners also use Ghash.io because they are able to offer 0% fees and a high hashrate consistently. Back a few months ago, CCN raised concerns....
CEX. IO and company CIO Jeffrey Smith believe that mining equipment should be sold at a fair market price. Currently in beta stages, CEX. IO is one of the first commodity exchanges, allowing users to trade mining facilities and fully maintained GHashes (Gigahash). The company has a unique approach to trading, and through this approach provides a way to trade on the increase or decrease in GHashes, while those mining facilities mine bitcoins for the user. The company's commodity-based model enables Bitcoin users to receive profit from trading GHashes, while also generating revenue from the....
For the past two weeks, the Bitcoin community has been buzzing with worry over the mining pool GHash.io. Founded in July 2013, the pool has quickly risen to become the world's largest Bitcoin mining group, prompting concerns that they will use their control over the network for malicious purposes (most worrisome would be a so-called 51% attack). With these concerns in mind, I contacted CEX.io (a cryptocurrency exchange and GHash's sister company) to request a comment on this issue. They directed me to Jeffrey Smith, CIO of CEX and GHash, who was kind enough to answer some questions about....
Tensions over bitcoin's long-term security have eased following a hastily-arranged roundtable of mining participants on 9th July in London. With representatives from all areas of bitcoin mining and ASIC hardware manufacturing in attendance, the most significant thing about the meeting was that it even occurred at all. A forum for discussing these issues is critical to maintaining the integrity of the bitcoin network, as its overall health depends on smooth mining operations with a minimum amount of orphaned blocks, hard forks and dominant players capable of executing a 51% attack. Last....
As Ghash.io's total hashrate approaches the feared 51% mark, there has been no official word from the pool's operating exchange, CEX. IO. Data from Blockchain.info indicates that Ghash.io's hashrate has been fluctuating between 40% and 50% of the network's total over the course of the week. Jeffrey Smith, CIO of CEX. IO tweeted on 11th June that the company was planning to release an official statement. He also reassured bitcoiners that he was aware of the situation at hand and did not intend to harm the community. I want everyone to know - we are aware of the 51% on @ghash_io We would....