Thank you very much for your excellent reply. I used up my entertainment time quota for today, so I'll just sketch my answer.
I'm doing a full quote of gmaxwell's post to try to preserve it for posterity.
I like it the most where he came up with "tiping the incentives" as an euphemism for extortion.
Luke-Jr has a very stilted writing style. gmaxwell is a world-class copy-writer.
Thank you. I've worked for years on my rhetoric so that when the new world order came I could at least find a place for myself as a an author of propaganda for The Authority.
We used to joke about "mining cartel". But now we have "mining mafia" consolidating the control of their territory. Forget about doing a collection for Max Keiser to shoot a short about Bitcoin. We should do a round of fund-raising to induce F.F.Coppola to direct and produce a "Godminer" triptych.
The challenges here were previously forseen: This is why litecoin uses an alternative POW, merged mining is the opposite extreme: You don't even have to stop mining bitcoin to mine a merged coin. Part of the argument for bitcoin's security, since day one, has been that it's more profitable to cooperate than it is to defect. At the introduction point of competitive bitcoin clone which is merged-mined the opposite is true. This is a class of error that the altchains make over and over again: Starting up another copy of bitcoin without really understanding the first ones.
But to be clear, I'm not talking about paying people not to attack. I'm talking about paying them to be positive instead of indifferent. Paying them to take the currently non-trivial cost of setting up another merged mining chain and mining it with default rules. There is no reason to mine the obscure currency altchains except for the hope of getting in on a ponzi scheme, or a fringe hope that they eventually mature to compete with bitcoin— and for people who care about Bitcoin's value and credibility those are the last things we want. If you offed people some bitcoin, that might easily overcome these reservations (after all, chances are no one will hear about any of these alt-cryptocurrencies) and help out providing the startup security that you need.
The problem of
indifference making new merged chains trivial to attack exists even without any pool centralization. If you subtract the big pools from the hash rate that CLC reached, what would it take to 50% it? 10GH? How many CLC advocates are solo bitcoin miners with a merged mining setup that could compete with that?
1) Some Bitcoin luminaries (like Gavin, casascius, Death&Taxes) have already begun thinking about other ways of defending the block-chain besides the brute force. Link:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.660862 and the following discussion. I just observe that conflict of interest (by being materially involved in mining) seems to be the biggest obstacle to understanding them.
2) Bitcoin can be viewed as a way to collect banking fees without incurring the fiduciary obligations. The concept of fiduciary duty is older than banking and as old as human societies. In majority of cases fiduciary duty has a positive value and lowers the cost of transactions in a society. In some narrow cases fiduciary duty has a large negative value and increases the cost of transactions: bank is fiducially obliged to prevent payment for contraband or financial support for Wikileaks. As it stands right now Bitcoin solves the problem of negative externalities only for relatively narrow class of users: smugglers, money launderers, etc. By reintroducing the concept of fiduciary obligation to the protocol the majority of users (for whom the externalities are positive) the overall cost of securing the network will be lower.