yeah, but as stated by the Chinese miners, they don't have superior connectivity. in fact, it's lower connectivity. thus, how can these largest 5 miners of all be a problem to small miners?
I'm not going to comment on the specifics of some Chinese miners and what connectivity they specifically have, between each other and with miners outside China. I also don't think it matters much and find it hard to believe you think that matters. In a year or a few years the network might look entirely different. But there will still
always be a range of connectivity (and other resources for that matter) available to miners. That is the more important issue.
actually, i'm not the one who brought up the attack initially. it was the 1MB'ers obsessing about yet another theoretical attack that has now been debunked.
The term "anti-spam" means exactly preventing abusers from submitting more volume of activity into the system as a whole than the system as a whole can handle. That "system as a whole" includes a large (ideally decentralized) network that exists over a wide range of geographic, economic, and technological constraints. Again I fail to see what improvements have been made in ability of the system to absorb spam, aside from relatively modest improvements in the underlying bandwidth, storage, etc., since 1 MB that would justify an 8x or 20x increase in that limit.
5 yr after 1MB, the network is much bigger, stronger, and more resilient. one can always obsess about these theoretical problems but the fact is that Bitcoin hasn't been broken and hasn't been attacked. there are quite a few network experts who've agreed with Gavin that scaling shouldn't be a problem. of course, the proof is in the pudding.