Quote from: msin on January 06, 2015, 04:22:50 AM

Quote from: marcus_of_augustus on January 06, 2015, 03:42:39 AM

Quote from: JorgeStolfi on January 06, 2015, 02:50:40 AM

Quote from: BlindMayorBitcorn on January 06, 2015, 01:26:45 AM

Your prose is amazingly polished and clear. You are a professor of something. Philosophy is my guess

Uh, thanks! Yes, a prof of Computer Science, at a public univ in Brazil.

prof. bitcoin troll. ... all of your claims in that lengthy (worthless) prose are unsubstantiated of course.

I wouldn't say it was worthless or unsubstantiated, but a little mislead. The main point being the lack of decentralization and the need to trust 3rd parties (mining pools). However, you could say that regardless of how decentralized bitcoin is or was, it always relies on miners (pools) to secure the blockchain, whether this is 4, 40, 400, 4000 etc.. regardless of the #, they could at any time decide to collude for 51% hashing power. There is no incentive for pools to conspire and regardless of the number of pools needed to reach 51%, there will always be a certain # of pools that "could" conspire. There are 4 US banks that could conspire to destroy the USD, but what incentive do they have to do so?

now imagine eying a SC for possible attack if you're a large pool. esp a SC like Zerocoin which, if you're a US based pool, was made illegal by the US gvt. you see thousands of scBTC riding Zerocoin yet you can't participate b/c you don't want to go to jail. what might you do?