Quote from: chiropteran on July 08, 2013, 02:08:01 PM

Quote from: rovchris on June 19, 2013, 05:01:59 PM

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.

I hear you man - but VISA have redundancy - multiple data centres - disaster recovery etc etc.

Look at this chart - http://www.asicminercharts.com/ these guys can not even maintain consistent throughput - there processing fluctuates by 50% which is massive.

The other issue is - if governments legislate against Bitcoin which is looking increasingly likely and mining has been centralised by a few companies - how easy is it for them to shut down a few companies as opposed to hundreds of thousands of miners?

Look at the Bit Torrent network - this has survived because there is no centralisation and there are no big companies that have a large stake holding of the network throughput - any company that did try like Napster was blown out of the water in no time at all. If bit torrent had been more centralised it would have been history a long time ago.