You compelled me to reply, even though I want to stop. Because you made false statements.
Sorry I can't continue this. I have work to do.
For later, then (P.S. I started writing this earlier in the day, had to get to some bitcoin related work, by the time I got back it was 1am, and I'm sleepy and not entirely lucid. So, apologies if I don't make too much sense here)
- Is it in the best interest of a mining pool or conglomerate to have 51% of the hashing power? (Y/N)
If you are the government then yes. Government is a monopoly on force (a well accepted definition by most academics). Without that monopoly, they lose their reason to exist.
If you are the government, unless you are a totalitarian dictatorship, or want to deliberately destroy bitcoin, then the answer is "not necessarily." If you gaining 51% puts your voter's money in jeopardy, and gets your politicians voted out, or worse, ruins the wealth of the senators already in power, it may be something that governments will avoid. Don't forget that people who run the place and make all the decisions are wealthy as hell, too. Also, as in the selfish miner countermeasure, if a government or some pool threatens to take over with a 51% attack, and is considered malicious, some pools can band together and create a "Bitcoin" fork that would split from the new "Govcoin." Though that will likely result in massive forking, chaos, and general collapse of the monetary system. And subsequent beheadings of government officials...
Personally, I think governments will lose the funding to support their monopoly on force before they realize what is happening...
Cartels will take over first. Once the cartels control 100% of mining, then the government will take over the cartels in "retaliation" (with winks and handshakes behind the scenes).
That is the normal course of events in democracy.
- Are threats such as deliberately mining blocks with zero transactions a legitimate concern? (Y/N)
No. But you miss the point. The cartel will put all the transactions in their blocks and withhold those transactions from the other miners, thus starving the other miners of income to pay electricity for PoW.
All transactions get propagated through the entire network of bitcoin users, with miners eventually also hearing them. So if you suggest that a mining cartel can somehow keep transactions from being broadcast, and keep other competing miners from hearing about them and mining them too, you are mistaken.
What I was asking about was the attack where a 51% cartel mines blocks that include only the transactions they wish to include, or includes no transactions at all, effectively stopping all transactions and freezing bitcoin. The simple solution to this problem is just to modify all clients to only accept blocks that have the most amount of transactions included, which can, and likely will, be done way before that becomes a problem.
You are incorrect. If Amazon offers a downloadable client (or even one that runs from their website), which sends the transactions to their server, they have no obligation to forward the transactions to other miners.
- Do miners have majority control over which blocks are considered valid? (Y/N)
I have no idea what you mean or what is your point?
I mean, can miners screw with Bitcoin by implementing arbitrary rules, such as increasing the total number of bitcoins, or creating nonstandard transactions, and forcing everyone else to eat them. I think the answer is no, since their blocks simply would not propagate. Point is that it is the clients that largely control the blockchain, not the miners. So if there are fixes, such as to accept blocks with the most transactions, already implemented into the clients, then the 51% attacker won't be able to do all that much harm.
Cartel can once it has destroyed all other miners and has 100% of the network hashrate.
This is precisely why democracy is failure, because the individuals are motivated to receive benefits from the collective:
Oh yes, not arguing that point. The major change between past and future is that a big mob of people used to be able to wield enough power to take the funds needed to support the benefits, and soon enough that will not be an option any more. Well, to a point. They can still take possession and control of physical property.
Cartels will own 100% of mining. No improvement at all for humanity. Worse we will be on a public ledger with no privacy nor anonymity. This is the 666 system.