mike: If the above sample of my PR consulting services has interested either you or a colleague, please be in touch and I'm sure we can negotiate an acceptable hourly rate. Referrals by request.
lol, tempting offer :-)
Although the scenario I wrote about in 2011 is still theoretically plausible, I don't think it will actually ever happen and that's why I haven't wrote about it much since. Even though pools are highly centralised, it's a very fragile sort of power and the top dog changes all the time. Once it was slush, then it was deepbit, then it was btc guild, now it's ghash.io ..... if ghash.io started refusing to include transactions for political purposes then undoubtably most miners would abandon them.
The problem is not so much how to fix this if it starts - it's detecting it in the first place. Also, defining what an acceptable miner policy is. I think everyone would agree "ignore transactions to wikileaks" would be an unacceptable policy, but for instance Eligius has in the past refused to process dice transactions on the grounds that they are spam. So where do you draw the line and figure out what you, as a miner, are personally comfortable with or not. Also did the no-dice policy hurt or help Eligius as a pool? I think these questions are still interesting to explore.