Since the amount of noise at bitcointalk and reddit is unbearable, I'd like to start a topic mostly catered to beginners/intermediates trying to learn more about cryptocurrency's. The quality of posts on 2p2 tends to be pretty high, so that might be helpful. I know some people will take offence to calling digital currency's 'crypto' , but at this point everybody knows what it means.

Any question should be allowed, but people should (as always) try make an effort to prevent double-questions.

I'll kick off, this might not be a super noob question, but it's something I can't wrap my head around.

Mining scenario which supposedly is happening:

A random mining pool has 100% of hashpower, let's say 5TH/s for a given coin. I add 5TH/s myself, bringing the total amount of hashpower to 10TH/s.

Another pool of botters/miners comes in with 12TH/s and takes all the blocks, leaving me with 0 block rewards and only orphaned blocks. They are not splitting the chain.

Can somebody explain me on a deeper level how this works, if this is even true/possible? Links to articles are appreciated too.

Yes please another topic.

You probably don't follow the existing crypto threads in this forum, then you would know that it has been decided not to have any more than the four that exist now. This will probably be removed or moved to one of the existing ones.

I will answer your question anyway. The new player with 12TH/s will control 12 out of a total of 22 terahashes. That is more than 50 % of all the mining power, which means that they can perform a 51 % attack. If they ignore all blocks that the other miners create, they will still be able to produce the longest valid chain, meaning nodes will see that as the correct one. That is why high total hashing power is a very important part of keeping a cryptocurrency secure. It makes it expensive to acquire the hardware necessary to perform a 51 % attack.

Yep, this.