Quote from: Vitalik Buterin on January 15, 2014, 12:16:25 PM

"We believe that centralization and decentralization both have their value, and must be used at the appropriate times. Startups, in practice, generally have to be dictatorial. However, institutions that are at the base level of society should ideally not be controlled by anyone. To that end, the way that we are structuring both the organization and the issuance model is that we will have a large amount of influence at the beginning, but that influence will quickly decay over time as the years progress."

Thanks Vitalik for the posting. Looking forward for the brilliant project.

But I still have not find any answer yet for one of the most critical questions for me:
How does Ethereum protect itself from an 51% attack in the bootstrapping phase?

A political (non-economical) motivated attacker (Banks, State) could buy in cheap from day 1 with mining a huge portion, stay silent and use the >51% power when they want to break it down. Some altcoins have been killed in the bootstapping phase by such attacks (probably just by someone wanting to demonstrate that its possible).
I guess Ethereum is on the radar of people in charge of securing the states/banks power and those people will see the huge potential in it. So I guess the threat is much higher than with all those boring alt coins clones we have seen in the last months...

I described some ideas and possible solutions to the above proble here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/1v78zi/protection_against_51_attack_in_bootstrapping/