[edited out]
what if we have 9billion GH's all coming from 3 mining pools...
i agree with you 1,000,000 GHs is more then enough to secure the network from outside attacks
but the concern ( altho unjustified ) is that minning is becoming more centralized which will make it easyer to push new changes onto the network.
i think that the strong incentive miners have to keep users happy makes this concern of a mining cartel "taking over" a "Todd"
def.Todd :
(1) irrational fear base on the premise that miners might work together in an effort to undermine the very network that sustains them.
You are not really going to get any argument from me that there is a need for a large number of miners and mining operations, and so there does likely need to be various kinds of protections regarding centralization.
My post was mostly responding to the assertion that the halvening had potentially caused some kind of meaningful drop in the hashpower, bitcoin's price and the implications that bitcoin was in a perilous state because of such supposed drop in mining power...
I will concede that due to risks of centralization there is a need for balancing and continuing an incentive for a relatively broad spread of miners..... yet I don't think that the halvening has had any meaningful impact yet on such centralization dynamics (if any exist).. and ultimately it seems pretty likely to me that BTC prices are going to go up because of the halvening - even though it could take a year or longer for such BTC supply cuts to become more painful in terms of availability of coins and causing BTC prices to increase more.
In the shorter term, it is much harder to really make meaningful assessments regarding which small changes here and there (including the halvening) are causing what, because there are a lot of changes going on all of the time in bitcoinlandia and BTC prices are continued to be pushed in both directions (with relatively low volume in recent weeks - even around the time of the halvening).