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Comment by cdh | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure this is true, regardless of how large Bitcoin grows to be. If a significant enough problem were discovered, wouldn't it be in everyone's best interest to protect the value of their wallets by accepting a forked blockchain?

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Tinfoil hat time: But not everyone will automatically comprehend the situation properly. There will be a possibility that media can be manipulated to keep the subvertible network alive and dominant through its network effect, while it is subtly manipulated from behind the scenes. Perhaps this happened before, and will happen again. (I'm talking about pre-Internet financial networks, as well as making a BSG reference. In BSG, if the Cylons were really smart, wouldn't they have taken over the financial and media networks instead of the defense computers? They would have had far more to gain from subtly controlling the wealth of the colonies instead of destroying it. Over time, they could have taken over society from the inside and just replaced everyone with attractive flashy sexbots.)

Wouldn't GHash be able to pivot their existing mining power to take 51% of that new blockchain?

Depends on what changes to the algorithm are involved.

An older discussion thread worth considering: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=327767.0

Yes, the extrapolation being missed by the article, is that the rich will control bitcoin, and nothing can ever stop that from happening. It goes to the very core of how bitcoin is designed that allows for it to be dominated by a large rich entity with enough processing power. Inherently the 'little guy' will be priced out of bitcoin, it was always going to be that way. Whether it's one or ten entities in question doesn't matter, bitcoin will be dominated by rich, powerful companies or persons, and that powerful position will only increase in fortification with time.

This principle pops the utopian fantasy of bitcoin that some cling to, but only a different approach to digital currencies will get you around the issue.

Money & power always consolidates down to the hands of a few that will possess dramatic influence compared to the rest of the market participants. See: JP Morgan, pre-Fed.

That's a grim reality if true. I don't have any information that would refute this claim, so I can't disagree, and it actually makes a lot of sense.

the rich will control bitcoin, and nothing can ever stop that from happening.

But should the rich have control in proportion to their richness or out of proportion to it? That's the key issue that I see behind this article (and the previous selfish mining work).

The proposed change would allow any GHash member to essentially steal mining profits from GHash (by taking the full reward for any blocks found, while still sharing in the reward for blocks found by other members). Since some participants will certainly selfishly take advantage of this opportunity, there would be a disincentive for honest members to belong to the pool, and it would therefore quickly lose its dominance.

Edit: And more generally, for the same reason, pools of this sort should cease to exist.

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