EDIT: I will also that ask that you and Luke-Jr discuss the Coiledcoin 51% attack accusations separately from this thread, if that's okay.
No, I believe the Coiledcoin attack should be a part of this discussion. I would never have known about it if it hadn't been brought up, so I investigated what happened. What Luke-jr did to Coiledcoin was similar to a bully on the beach coming along and kicking apart a sand castle some kids were in the middle of building, saying it was in the way of people walking on the beach as justification. He used computing resources which did not belong to him, but were entrusted to his care, to sabotage another project.
This discussion has shown some serious problems with Bitcoin, a high degree of consolidation of centralized control, which needs to be addressed. Proof of work mining was the main turn-off as a gross waste of resources and energy when I first learned about Bitcoin. It would be good if Counterparty and Mastercoin could migrate away from Bitcoin, preferably to a PoS or proof of contribution blockchain.
Can somebody post some credible sources about the coiledcoin event? I currently mine via Eligius and would like to reconsider if this is being accurately portrayed.
More generally, I think pools should be a lot more aggressive about differentiating themselves politically, so small-time miners can 'vote' to support the kind of bitcoin we want. (Though I also understand Adam Back's point, that the miners aren't all that important in comparison to the 'political' clout of the people simply running a node, I still think there's some signal in supporting certain pools over others).
And I assume there's docs for it 
