Quote from: dperfect on January 06, 2014, 01:58:06 AM

To me, seeing some miners forced out as a consequence (due to difficulty or hardware limitations) seems like a price worth paying for the network's survival.

Would Satoshi turn in his anonymous grave - figuratively speaking? Just a reminder:

"We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust. We started with the usual framework of coins made from digital signatures, which provides strong control of
ownership, but is incomplete without a way to prevent double-spending. To solve this, we proposed a peer-to-peer network using proof-of-work to record a public history of transactions that quickly becomes computationally impractical for an attacker to change if honest nodes control a majority of CPU power. The network is robust in its unstructured simplicity. Nodes work all at once with little coordination. They do not need to be identified, since messages are not routed to any particular place and only need to be delivered on a best effort basis. Nodes can leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the proof-of-work chain as proof of what happened while they were gone. They vote with their CPU power....."

* A system that does not rely on trust.
* "the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending"
* "Unstructured simplicity"
*etc.

The fact that ASICs have enabled the security of the network is offset, IMHO, by market driven behaviour pushing people to seek greater market efficiencies in order to maximise profit. Nothing wrong with that, except that bitcoin seemed to have been partly founded on the solution to the double-spending, which was proposed to be resolved by a true and unstructured p2p CPU system.

I would have said forcing small miners out qualifies as a Gorden Gekko moment, n'est-ce pas?