Have you felt like being betrayed by the ASIC manufacturers lately? You are not alone. We all feel the same way. We, as home miners, popularized bitcoins through our supports and utilization. It was written in stones that ASIC manufacturers produce the machine and we as home miners use them to mine. It used to be a sin for the manufacturer to mine and compete with us.
Now the unwritten laws are broken. ASIC manufacturers are plainly setting up data centers to mine. They are directly competing with us, the backbone of ASIC supporters. They are betraying us. I hope this will lead to the collapse of btc and the eventual death of the ASIC manufacturers.
I hope we as home miners will just dump bitcoins and let it collapse.
This is a good question. Strictly speaking, Discus Fish, with a nearly 30% market share of bitcoins mined (if I read the pie chart correctly) is a monopoly that could be in theory broken up by the government where the majority of its bitcoin mining hardware resides. I know, I know, it's not going to happen nor should it happen (I am against antitrust in general) but this is exactly how Standard Oil, by J.D. Rockefeller, was broken up by the USA in the turn of the last century.
What happens when one company controls 100% of the Bitcoins mined? Let's say it happens? One of two things: either they can wreck the entire system by messing with the blockchain (unlikely unless they are crazy), or, 'raise prices' by controlling the supply of bitcoins, the same way DeBeers controls (or tries to, and they've done a pretty good job the last few decades or more) the price of diamonds, to extract monopoly profits. This is Econ101, not controversial. Some would say monopoly profits will encourage other mining pools to enter, and that's the way it works in theory, but sometimes, due to technological constraints (let's say Discus Fish invents some super-duper ASIC that's 1M times better than everybody else's and threatens to flood the market if any other big miner enters the market and this is known to everybody, etc etc), other firms cannot enter quickly enough, so either the monopolist will get monopoly profits for a long time (DeBeers, maybe OPEC), or, the government steps in and busts them up.
TonyT