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Comment by KirinDave | Hacker News Reader

I think a world where multiple, visible sysadmins compete is much better than a world that pretends to have none when in fact their technology enables invisible, undetectable but exceptionally powerful groups to form out of self interest. Wouldn't you agree?

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Are you referring to miners? They are neither undetectable, nor exceptionally powerful. They do have an environmental impact, but the bitcoin community believes the juice is worth the squeeze.

I think the reference was to invisible powers controlling your news, search, social, legislative, and economic institutions.

No. It is possible for miners to collude and get unfair advantages, without even close to 1/3 the hashpower, and without being easily detectable.

I don't know why this is getting downvoted. The current assumption that colluding miners are detectable is absolutely false. There is no way of knowing whether a block comes from a specific mining farm/network as all information about that is forgable by the creator of the block.

If you try to mitigate this by controlling who has access, you just eliminated the advantage of being trustless and thus made blockchain an expensive database.

Please go read the selfish mining paper.

I prefer a world where some Giancarlo Devacini guy, living and working in offshore country, can issue billions of "dollars" out of thin air and being literally unaccountable. /s

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