Remember Hearn's quote about 'no difference between freezing coins and keeping them from being spent for 20 years.' I see no indication that he has not worked toward that goal (extreme miner consolidation far beyond what is practical at 1MB) since that time. All the while fostering other potential attack vectors as well of course.
What's the point about mike here? I'm totally missing it.
Discrimination in mining, and Mike being early to realize the 'utility.' Sorry to have lost you...
If you need it tied back to the tittle of the thread, I don't supposed it has escaped you that Mike and Gavin work as a team now...with an obvious and and amusing hierarchical structure. Probably when Mike was postulating about mining consolidation and the nice things that that could accomplish Gavin's head had as many question marks hovering around it as 95% of the rest of the readers here. Things have 'evolved' in the interceding four years.
Now that the space on the blocks is becoming a very rare resource, they it will be the same for the confirmations.
So it's logic that who manage this space (like pools as BTCC) is trying to get more income from it.
In theory, sidecoins are a nearly perfect proxy for native Bitcoin. And in practice, the Blockstream dudes seem to be making great progress as I see it. Scaling problem solved. It is certainly possible that 1MB won't be enough for Bitcoin in a backing roll at some point. Everyone recognizes this. It will become more clear how many years off that is once the sidechains ecosystem blossoms.
I don't care if individual side-chains are centralized and consolidated. I'll balance my risk between whichever ones I choose and draw off my stake in any that I dis-agree with or don't/cannot trust.
I care only that I have one trusted option at the pinicle. That would be native Bitcoin (currently, and hopefully going forward) as a base store of value which I can use on the irregular instances where it really matters. Keeping that (and just that) 'free' is the most important thing to me. I am nearly completely sure that Mike and Gavin see things similarly except just the opposite. The most critical thing is to contain Bitcoin and hand it over to the mainstream banks. Why is less clear to me.
Anyway, the mining thing is probably a canard and not really that big a problem. If the miners became to obnoxious a hard-fork would totally fuck anyone doing sha256 on ASIC so they probably would not dare. If it came to a hard-fork for that reason a whole lot of other loose-end type things could be rolled in as well. I've petitioned the Blockstream guys to work on such a thing as a background task so that if such an action is unavoidable (for this reason or others) the outcome will be more positive than negative.
The Blockchain is secure thanks to the avidity of the miners, it can't be otherwise.
Bitcoin would work just fine with me running one CPU miner in the background...as long as nobody attacked it.
I notice that the Blockstream guys were very clever insofar as they started out setting very long expectations. In the days-range as I recall. What this means is that a superior resources attack would need to be sustained successfully for a long time and it would be quite expensive and the probability of success against countermeasures would be relatively low. Smart folks! (I tend to bet my money on smart folks, BTW.)