Quote from: vilain on January 06, 2016, 08:29:45 PM

If I read correctly, you're missing the whole point of cryptocurrencies: the decentralised aspect of it.

I don't think you read the post at all. The end game game theory of PoW is to form a monpoly with greater than 50% hash rate placed in multiple rathole pools (sybil attack) because if you don't do it, someone else can, so it's the only logical move to protect your investment. In other words, you're accomplishing the attack you seek to prevent (but not executing it) to stop the other guy from doing it. Since there's no way to know who owns the pools, it's a system of security through obscurity.

While being not so likely, for all you know, Satoshi owns every mining pool that's ever existed. The point is, the system is designed to monopolize, while also being almost impossible to verify the real state of security of the system at any given time. If you accept that as a security model, you're also accepting a security model of someone owning over 50% hash rate out in the open.

Any argument against alternative consensus mechanisms has to take the above facts about PoW into account, but the people who argue against them usually face paper tigers opponents instead of me, so PoW always ends up looking a million times better than it should be. The real, non-biased starting point of the discussion should be that things like PoW with pool mining may not be valid at all, so there's probably plenty of alternatives worth considering.

Quote from: hdbuck on January 06, 2016, 08:12:17 PM

Heh, ph0rkers and their shitcoins, nothing new.

If you're going to play that semantics argument, then Bitcoin doesn't currently exist and you're already using an altcoin since Bitcoin has been hard forked multiple times before.