Quote from: azw409 on June 14, 2013, 05:13:31 PM

They wouldn't openly do it but they still could and not make it public. Besides even if they regularly and publicly exceeded 51% there's nothing in the software to self-destruct bitcoin - most people would turn a blind eye because they would have too much invested already to see it all disappear. Meanwhile ASICMiner would continue minting most of the new coins and become a monopoly that nobody could challenge.

The only way to prevent this happening is to modify the software so that miners could use either sha256 or scrypt to mine blocks - this will mean that GPU's can carry on contributing and it would be impossible for ASICMiner (or any other ASIC monopoly) to become a majority simply because even they could solve all of the sha256 blocks, the sha256 difficulty would get too high and then more blocks would be found with scrypt.

They would not have to announce it, within minutes people would notice it and it would be all over the net. Just think of the bad press Bitcoin would get if that happened.