pools will be obsolete and only private farms will turn a profit thus bringing the doom and gloom end to bitcoin.
I don't follow your logic?!?
Pools will be obsolete because of private farms which will destroy Bitcoin??
That's kind of like the movie "Soylent Green" where global warming caused all food sources to be destroyed which in turn caused a population boom and over populated the Earth.
Obviously I'm missing something, please explain it too me.
It's a bit of a stretch. Mining centralization has been here since 2011 in the form of pools. It made miners feel a little better because they knew that if a pool did something, they could just leave, and in aggregate that would be enough. GHash.io is the next step in that, where you have a "pool" that is attached to a giant private farm. BTC Guild sort of had this in early 2013, since ASICMINER used BTC Guild exclusively for most of its early launch, and most Avalons also pointed to BTC Guild, but these were separate entities and not within my control.
There's not a huge difference in effect between having 4-6 major pools and having 4-6 private mining corporations, except for the way miners feel about the two. In one, miners have some control, though how much is up for debate. In the other, it is entirely out of their control. I've been in this game for almost 4 years now, and from early on I've known this was going to happen, although I didn't expect to see it in 2014/2015. Most of us didn't even expect to see ASICs for over a decade, but we underestimated the gullibility of people to pre-order hardware that didn't exist yet in order to fund the development of said hardware. Then again, even without pre-order madness we would have had ASICs, since ASICMINER did the correct approach by raising investment capital honestly and openly, and they were the first ones to have wide deployment.
These days, I'm not so sure if the mining scene is even a factor in Bitcoin adoption/price/viability. The technology itself works great even with fewer entities involved in the mining process. The only concern comes from consolidation/cooperation of those entities to enforce new soft rules on the network. While mining can never execute a hard fork without the market following it, they can enforce a soft fork which lies within the rules defined in the protocol. Things like enforcing higher fees by not including transactions, or even forcing higher fees by orphaning blocks that include transactions without fees.
