And what happens when none of their transactions get processed? Before you say, the difficulty falls and people start mining again, then you have one large operator able to do a 51% attack with a little tiny bit of the hashing power.
We've seen it happen before several times, it's called SolidCoin and the rest of the scamcoins.
We've seen it happen before several times, it's called SolidCoin and the rest of the scamcoins.
Yes, I agree that's the biggest hurdle. I pointed that out in a previous post but Luke was talking about economic majority, not mining majority.
The reality is that a relatively small number o people (10-20? including big pool operators and developers mainly) have the influence to change even the mining algorithm. You can contest that they might not rally enough support, but I think that's a bit naive. This is the reality in Bitcoin land right now, I'd expect it to be different in the future, but the "core" of influential people remains very small. For instance, nobody else that I know other than Gavin and "Satoshi" can broadcast alerts to all clients. That's real power. If a few of the bigger pools decided to not include free transactions, it would pretty much be the end of them as they'd be unusable. Etc. Simply deciding not to halve reward come December, is perfectly possible and I bet most miners would be happy about it.
