The GHash mining pool says that the Bitcoin community shouldn’t worry at all about the fact that it has recently breached the 51 percent threshold of the total cryptographic hashing output on several occasions.

“Our investment, participation, and highly motivated staff confirm it is our intention to help protect and grow the broad acceptance of Bitcoin and categorically in no way harm or damage it,” Jeffrey Smith, the CIO of GHash.io, said Monday in a prepared statement to Ars. “We never have and never will participate in any 51 [percent] attack or double spend against Bitcoin. Still, we are against temporary solutions, which could repel a 51 [percent] threat.”

Smith did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for further comment.

GHash’s new statement seems to indicate that those holding large amounts of bitcoins shouldn’t worry about the organization, as it claims to be trustworthy with this unprecedented power.

As Ars reported Sunday, during these periods when the 51 percent mark is surpassed, GHash operators had powers that circumvented the decentralization, which is often held up as a salient advantage Bitcoin has over traditional currencies. So-called 51 percenters, for instance, have the ability to spend the same coins twice, reject competing miners' transactions, or extort higher fees from people with large holdings. Even worse, a malicious player with a majority holding could wage a denial-of-service attack against the entire Bitcoin network.

Knights of the round table

The Monday statement continued:

We also recognize however that a long term preventative solution to the threat of a 51 [percent] attack does have to be found, the current situation we find ourselves in (essentially being punished for our success) is damaging not only to us, but to the growth and acceptance of Bitcoin long term, which is something we are all striving for. To that effect we are in the process of arranging contact to the leading mining pools and Bitcoin Foundation to propose a ‘round table’ meeting of the key players with the aim of discussing and negotiating collectively ways to address the decentralization of mining as an industry. Our aim is to do this quickly with a possible date coinciding with the CoinSummit Conference in London.

In January 2014, GHash put out a previous statement saying that any one actor taking 51 percent “is [a] serious threat to the Bitcoin community. GHash.IO will take all necessary precautions to prevent reaching 51 percent of all hashing power, in order to maintain stability of the Bitcoin network.”

Caveat Bitcoiner

In a blog post on the Bitcoin Foundation website last Friday, Gavin Andresen, the group’s chief scientist, did not seem too concerned about GHash’s newfound power. He broke down two major theoretical threats. The first concerned where the pool could double-spend transactions and then trade those bitcoins for dollars.

“There are some practical problems with carrying out that attack, though,” he wrote. “They are likely to get caught, because it is impossible to wire money to a bank account anonymously. It seems very likely they would find themselves in legal trouble for defrauding the exchange.

The second thing a 51 percent group could do would be to prevent transactions or new blocks from other people getting accepted, effectively stopping all payments and shutting down the network.

"I wrote about neutralizing that attack a couple of years ago,” Andresen wrote before concluding with a caveat. “However, this is a good time to re-iterate my standard disclaimers: Bitcoin is still a work in progress, and you should only risk time or money on it that you can afford to lose.”