Since most of you obviously haven't read it, let me direct your attention to Section 6 of the
Bitcoin white paper:
The incentive may help encourage nodes to stay honest.
If a greedy attacker is able to assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes,
he would have to choose between using it to defraud people by stealing back his payments,
or using it to generate new coins.
He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules,
such rules that favour him with more new coins than everyone else combined,
than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth.
Satoshi isn't infallible or god ... wise , yes, but made plenty of mistakes along the way ...