A bunch of naive, idealistic blather
The first thing you fail to understand is that this is a business, not a charity. Get that through your head and the rest of it will make sense.
If you want to buy a miner for me, I will happily point it at any pool of your choosing. As long as I'm spending MY money on equipment, then I'll point MY equipment on whatever fucking pool I see fit. If smaller pools want to attract more miners, they should get their asses in gear and improve the pools to make them more attractive for use. Things like extended stats, DDoS protection, and consistently working payouts (I'm looking at you, Eligius).
If you are so concerned about decentralization, I sure hope you are solo mining. If you can't walk the walk, then stop trying to talk the talk.
the real problem to his point is not that there are a small group of elite that control and abuse power, but that there is an endless line of similarly wired people waiting to replace them if given the chance
America's forefathers were an outlier, not the norm. It didn't even last 200 years. 1776 till when JFK was shot. No turning back now.
More like 1774 to 1791. The US constitution has all the seeds of tyranny built into it, with some superficial nods to individualism and liberty. The articles of Confederation were vastly superior precisely BECAUSE they ceded very little power to the central organization.
That being said, I think I have technical grounds to take exception with SeanRaney's post. I understand the anger.
However, the large pools are still decentralized in a real sense, as they are completely dependent on miners actually going there. While I would personally rather mine in a smaller pool for many of the reasons stated, or even solo mine if I had sufficient hash power, this doesn't change the nature of the beast. If a pool operator misbehaves badly, it's a three second fix. And then the huge pool becomes no pool. Pools do not set the regulations or the limits of bitcoin, they merely aggregate the results of multiple miners. Much like "the internet" is an aggregate of every computing device connected to it. If one unit fails, many are able to take it's place.
Where I see a bigger weakness is that it is currently difficult to find detailed information about setting up and operating a pool. This in itself is not egregious, but it is frustrating. In the age of ASIC chips, I would think that "out of the box" poolservers would be a good thing, as local clubs and even some of the larger purchasers could easily set up their own pools and diversify the network very far. This in itself would quickly alleviate the perception of pools centralizing the network.
On to the more philosophical points of his post, I believe very strongly that people DO NOT need to be ruled, but DO desire it to a greater or lesser extent. I am an anarchist. I am an individualist. I actually do quite well in the absence of humans, so I perhaps have a different perspective than most.
What I have seen, over and over again, is people who ought to know better clamoring for some rule because of what somebody else did that offended/frightened/titillated them. That the same rule can and will be used against them doesn't seem to occur to them. Especially given the widespread worship of democracy, this is a great argument AGAINST rulers. Rulers care not for the wellbeing of the ruled, except to the extent that said ruled are useful or useable by the rulers. They want you cowering in fear or waving a bloody flag. Resist that primitive urge to give in to the loud voice, and your life improves immeasurably. The collective good is served best by ignoring it and concentrating on your own success. That this is chaotic and full of squabbling is meaningless. Most things worth doing are going to be difficult. Liberty is not cheap nor easy, but it is rewarding.
I do not see the greed of short sighted miners as a problem, except to the miners themselves. Unprincipled greed and poor understanding of economic realities means that most of the really greedy and unthinking miners will drop by the wayside when marginal profits are on par with reality, whereas those with longer vision will ride out the hills and valleys and strengthen the network BECAUSE OF their profit seeking. While individuals will both fail and succeed, the paradigm itself will only fail if mining becomes the sole focus of the bitcoin world. If instead, it is promoted and actively used as currency, then the miners will win, the people who use bitcoin will win, and the experiment will succeed.
I too think that a lot of miners focus too much on short term positive ROI, thinking (or at least posting) things like the miners will never pay for themselves unless they breakeven in the next two weeks or two months or whatever. I think that two YEARS would be a better way to figure it, as that's pretty realistic for the level of investment we're looking at. It would also allow your plan to be more flexible, folding near term income into more hashpower and more efficient miners as they become available. This is not a zero sum game, never was, never will be. At some point, if the experiment is to succeed in the long term, then the transactional side (of which miners are a vital component) will vastly outstrip the generation of coins via solving blocks. And frankly, when it happens (if it happens) it will happen very quickly. The world's reserve currencies are openly failing. The central bankers are putting truckloads of band-aids on a sucking chest wound and hoping the patient won't bleed to death before they can come up with a new scam. It's not working, and they know it. They just don't know how to break the cycle of madness (doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results). Bitcoin, due to it's inherent properties, is one such solution. But if it's to succeed, it cannot change fundamentally, and that means that those who mine NEED to learn long term planning. That most will not doesn't hurt the experiment, but it can very definitely hurt the individual miners.
