Powerful people always form cartels, there's no "might do" about it. This is simply because it's always more profitable (in the long run) for small groups to work together against the public than to compete. Long term planning always wins over the burst benefits of the short term.
I see no way the wealth vector from the old system wouldn't be able to flood into a mining system (as in if one machine can do a thing, a million machines can do a thing a million times.) It would be good to be able to construct a cryptocurrency that does not rely on mining in this way. Something where value is generated corresponding to real physical value (like human work or a product.) But then you lose the ability to entice people into the currency by playing off greed (like bitcoin,) making it extremely hard to implement.
To truly tackle this beast with a currency you would need to get at all three pillars of empire. Coinage, for sure, but also the courts (international, national) and religion (media and education.) To attempt to topple the tower by attacking just one pillar would be possible, but it has increased difficulty because the other fundaments stand ready to compensate and flood in. It must be designed so that it can stand up to this. The solution whatever it is must be holistic, outlaw-friendly and jihad-proof.
Jubalong,
You are spot on. I am impressed by your intellect, it would be my pleasure to know you more.
I am contemplating a solution to the 51% attack.
I am thinking we really don't need the miners to process transactions. We only need them to create new coins and to keep a copy of the transactions that occurred independently of the P2P database.
My idea which would also make transactions instantaneous, is that benefactor of a payment will stipulate how much reserve the payer has to attach to the payment. This reverse is returned to the payer after some time, when we are sure the payment has propagated into the P2P database. If the payer submits multiple spends within that time window, he forfeits everything including the reserve amount.
Perhaps that could be an optional mode perhaps, with the current single block chain as an alternative for those who don't want the option above.
Since only the payer's private key can create a duplicate spend, no malicious miner can do this.
Thus if 51% refuse to record the transaction, the other 49% do record the transaction. No harm done.
When the benefactor polls the database to see if a payer's balance is correct, any miner can respond.
The 51% is only need to determine who created the coins. From there, it is the private key that determines where the funds went to.
So as you said, keep the greed part for creating coins and get rid of the 51% attack on processing. We were thinking along the same lines, and I just hadn't written down (collected/assimilated) the thoughts I been having since yesterday.
The fact that Satoshi did not design the system this way (along with
all the other weirdness, even the developers said he disappeared when they pushed to know his identity), is another reason I am Occam's Razor that he was working for the cartels. But whether this is true or not, isn't really worth arguing over and my thesis does not depend on it.
I need to think more if this is a viable design. This was just off the top of my head.
I am liking my choice of a name more and more, seems perfect:
DURACASHIf the 51% goes berserk and creates coins faster than the prescribed rate, then (some of) the benefactors will stop honoring those later coins. So they defeat themselves.