The ethos behind bitcoin is fantastic but their is a fatal flaw that is being highlighted at the moment and that is the difficulty. It only leads to one logical conclusion the centralisation of mining and transaction processing as that will be the only way you will be able to generate any coins.

ASICMiner has some problem at the moment and because they are so large it has impacted the entire network. If another big mining pool goes down we may be looking at 40 mins between blocks maybe even longer - transactions are not processed if no blocks are solved.

The whole resilience of the network is being brought into question here - If these guys go offline for what ever reason with the difficulty where it is now everything is going to grind to a halt. A couple of business should NOT have this impact on the network.

What are your thoughts on this?