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?
If VISA decides to shut everything down, doesn't the same happen to the credit card network?
Why isn't this a huge problem? VISA is making money hand over fist, and shutting down for no reason is irrational and would cause them to lose money.
Well, ASICMINER is in the same position. It would be completely irrational for them to stop mining and throw money away.
My thoughts are that it is not a problem, in fact it is a benefit of bitcoin. If VISA goes down, VISA cards stop working. If ASICMINER stops mining, transactions take a little longer to process, but they do still get processed eventually. This is a vast improvement.