it did happen. someone with an overwhelimgly powerful rig, early on. i did question john about it; if i understood his reply rightly our masterful dev used his coding skills to persuade the network to reject the offending blocks, by consensus
[edit!] it was NOT when pool mining - the event referred to occurred in december 2014, i believe
Ok, this is the concerning part.
We agreed to have a fair and open watergun fight amongst ourselves in the school yard. We are all using Wal-Mart squirter pistols and having a good time. Then, a rich kid went and bought a Super Soaker 9 Billion XQT ReCharger and proceeded to light everyone up, and dominate the fight.
The guy who invented all the cool rules of the watergun game said, "Hey, rich kid! Go away! You're making the game not fun for everyone else!" and the rich kid with his Super Soaker 9 Billion XQT said, "Fuck off, I'm playing by the same rules you are, I just have a better toy."
So the kid who invented the game declared, "Ok guys, then from now on, we won't count any shots by Super Soakers. Deal?" and everyone agreed because it made the game more fun.
The kid took his Super Soaker and went home because no one wanted to play with him anymore.
Do you see the problem with this? Do you think that this game will pass a test for truly open and transparent going forward? What happens when something else happens that someone doesn't like? People will all just look to the leader kid and say, "Hey! This is like that fucker with the Super Soaker! John, do something!" and the 'leader' will be forced to declare new rules and regulations.... aka, centralization.
John Connor was overwhelmingly a good guy, but (movie spoilers, spoiled in the movie trailer itself in the following image):
http://i.imgur.com/CZxw2Lu.jpg.
.
.
.
.
If algo or block manipulation has occurred in any way, this invalidates the entire currency and a new and impartial fork needs to restart from the genesis block. The only time this is acceptable is if a user truly was irrevocably breaking the game forever afterwards (like creating fake blocks or fake coins), NOT if they were simply winning by using the best hardware.