Do you know the deepbit (owners) ? If you want to talk about centralization let's look at how one group has nearly 50% control of BTC network.
That is more centralization than 10x trusted accounts equally having control (for now).
Not only do we know the deepbit owner (
Tycho), but I would trust him more than any "trusted SolidCoin millionaires account". And nothing in SolidCoin prevents a "trusted account" from setting up a pool and performing a majority attack. True, there are only 10 trusted accounts, but the same is true for Bitcoin (less than 10 large pools). In fact, have you ever considered the following viewpoint:
You present trusted SolidCoin millionaire accounts as people who have a lot invested in SolidCoin, therefore are unlikely to cheat the system and can be trusted to solve all even blocks. A large Bitcoin pool owner, in effect, fills the same role. He has invested a lot in Bitcoin (time developing and maintaining his pool), has a lot to lose (pool revenues), had to work on gaining very public trust from the users over time, and his pool effectively solves a good fraction of the blocks. I would argue that the Bitcoin model is superior to the SolidCoin model whose "trusted accounts" are
unknown and anonymous and chosen by someone other than the users. Bitcoin gives power to the users by letting them dynamically vote who they trust by choosing where they mine. SolidCoin dangerously set the trusted accounts in stone with arbitrary static rules.
What do you think?
That said, Bitcoin and SolidCoin are different:
- On one hand, for Bitcoin, majority attacks ("51% attacks") are a non-problem. The hashrate is too high to attack, no one will spend $10M to attack it today. Pools have too much to lose to attempt the attack themselves. And Bitcoin has a long-term solution easily implementable anyway, by giving pool users control of the blocks: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/think-i-just-solved-the-pool-problem-9137 For all these reasons, your criticism of majority attacks being possible against Bitcoin is unfounded.
- On the other hand, majority attacks are a real problem for (and only for) startup cryptocurrencies, like SolidCoin, who have to start the hashrate from zero. So, in a way, I understand why you have to come up with a non-optimal mechanism to try to protect your network from attacks.