Heh I suppose it's out of the realm of supposition that a private cryptocurrency would necessarily draw a majority private mining base, like the kind not keen on packaging all their miners data and sending their mining data to one source or another, right?
I mean speculating on an 'unknown' mining base is the same as looking at the block explorer and trying to make a rich list without a public facing address/viewkey upload registry for the most part imo.
Sure it could be a lot of things, good and bad. Both nature of privacy and the lack of coin in the pocket more often than not inhibit the spread of information, which contrary to many beliefs does come at a cost.
Philosophically you are right. But I don't speak about Philosophy, but rather about a real "ground truth" treat like 51% attack on ETC done few days before.
Usage of unknown "hidden" pools is quite strange practice since there were a lot of ASICs and botnets in the XMR past that've used public "official" pools with great success. There is no need for someone to build "hidden" pool - EXCEPT he want to 51% attack us...
Hey what can I say .. I mean it would be a drop in the bucket if the mining algo wasn't changed and then we'd probably be talking about asics or something instead of 51% attacks but at least we kept our dignities!!1
Realistically I would prepare for the worst and expect a pretty nice re-org myself. But then again this thing forks every six months so worst case is we're down until then, after they unwind a bunch of things and we're all the more broke for it.
Either bend over for asics or get bent over by the people the asics are there to stop, kinda really only two choices when it comes to PoW and not having enough hash rate. I mean, what people are being empowered by a permanently vulnerable chain? But what do I know not enough I guess.
OK thought about it some more and:
Whereby Monero forks every six months, FPGA and ASIC miners have a direct monetary incentive to conceal their identities. Their discovery and persecution being within the scope of the current development teams initiative literally pushes them toward privacy.
This is, of course, making the assumption that they do indeed profit off of mining .. and is likely not the only assumption being made in order to come to this conclusion.
So rather than philosophically, there are tangible, real and measurable benefits to these 'non-approved' miners profiting off of the mining that would otherwise be taking place by the smaller miners.
In much the same way monero users would tend toward utilizing privacy in order to express their freedom to conduct business freely, asic and fpga miners are very likely utilizing privacy to exercise their freedom to mine profitably. Taking their mining nodes offline by [ddos, etc..] due to constant exposing of their personal data and ip addresses to the 'monero-approved network' risks for them a direct monetary penalty and a real thing that has happened before in eliminating the competition.
Still, methinks it's just the beginning of this type escalation if indeed it is FPGA's and ASIC's (which i suspect it is).
RealisticallyIdeally, the best case, in my own opinion, is to hope that it's just some hungry non-approved FPGA's and ASIC's looking for a meal.
Also the ethereum bleedover was a good point.
