Quote from: Rarrikins on May 17, 2013, 10:11:07 PM

How do you know that a majority of hashing power accepting no-fee transactions is going to be working with one plan to attack bitcoin, rather than preserving the value of their existing bitcoins (which would be worth less after such an attack) or preserving their bitcoin-based business or helping out because they like using bitcoin and would be inconvenienced if it lost credibility or something else? Or the same sorts of things with people paying fees.

I don't mean attack by literally attacking the currency to harm it, but to project their power into the economy. The last thing they would want to do is harm the currency. That's what I mean by "benevolent". They could do stuff like charge tx fees to their competitors, freeze the assets of whatever politically convenient boogeyman the media tells us we happen to be scared of, arbitrarily tax everybody, you know, all the shit a decentralized currency supposedly prevents.

Quote from: Rarrikins on May 17, 2013, 10:11:07 PM

Also, what if bitcoin clients included some code to use the processor and graphics card in such a way that they didn't use any more power (by avoiding stepping up the frequency or whatever) in order to hash? You could get a lot of hashing power that way, and some lucky people would randomly get some fees in their accounts.

Think about what you are saying... Other cryptocoin types use hashing algorithms which somewhat level the playing field hardware wise. Maybe that's what you're trying to say. Anyway, this has nothing to do with the problem.