From another POV this smells like centralization ... original idea behind cryptocurrency is that it should be free competition for everybody able to participate and with fixed conditions (not changeable whenever originator wants).
True, but I'm thinking of a scenario when the network is at it's first growing steps and all of a sudden a malicious group starts mining with, let's say 90% of all hashing power.The only short-term defense I could think of is renting hashing power, to reestablish some fairness, where noone mines with >51% of hashing power. The downside is rentals cost real money. I was wondering if there were any other ideas to counteract such a move.
My guess is all devs face similar worries and had there been some simple and working solution it would have been already used by many coins.
I've seen some coins made first few hundred thousand blocks with very small reward. The reason behind could be to discourage huge mining farms while the word about new coin spreads around, hopefully delivering enough miners with sufficient hashrate to prevent this happen.
But IMO it's more responsibility of miners rather than devs to prevent this happen. Just offer them enough pools to choose from and responsible miners (those who knows the threats of 51% attack) should keep the balance.
Though I was pretty disapointed with e.g. SIA network state after bitmain unleashed those A3 beasts ... people obviously didn't care of network at all, everybody was joining same pool no mater what.
