Hey eleuthria,
Thanks for all the work you do!
Question about BTCGuild, have you and friedcat spoken about ensuring you don't tip over 50%? Do you know if he is going to move some of the hash rate over to other pools?
Spreading ASICMINER's hashpower has been discussed to death. friedcat has also addressed the concern several times in this thread. His responses lead me to be comfortable knowing he understands our concerns and shares them, and ASICMINER has several options available to make sure it does not become an issue to worry over.
I'm not going to repost it all in context, but a few relevant portions of friedcat's posts:
The future of difficulty or our portion is unclear to us. If we are really lucky enough to be able to take a large percentage for a long time, we are the last ones who would like to see panics. Decentralization could be achieved by scattering some of our future computation power to consumers, or letting many different pools with different interests control them and use them for good.
Note - one option mentioned here in a fairly old update is already ongoing, the selling of consumer devices to help distrubute the hashpower.
It's possible and will definitely do it. Also in the next days if without special circumstances/announcements, new hashpower will be added to the four existing accounts. And in further future if we solo, switch to new pools, or add new accounts of ours, we will not make them anonymous but make them seen by anyone, the same as the four existing accounts.
Not directly addressing the question, but indicates they are prepared to utilize other pools or solo.
I'm confident ASICMINER will seek to both maximize shareholders profits, while always keeping the security of the network well in mind also.