There is a much easier way for the government to take over Bitcoin than 51% attack and selfish mining. Simply tax the coin and per footnote [2] all coin is tainted regardless if you used Tor or not, so in effect regulate every pool and exchange. Regulation can accomplish much of the same goals as takeover. Then later the large corporations beholden to the government buyout the pools and exchanges, and then the drift towards cartels and corporate-fascism.
Don't you think that P2P mining pool can solve the problem of regulation or big corporations takeover?
Definitely not since it is so easy for the centralized pools to have their miners compute shares for a competing P2Ppool but withhold block solutions from the P2Ppool (and submit them for themselves) thus parasiting the P2Ppools of revenue while not impacting the revenue of the centralized pool. So centralized pools which wanted to eliminate P2Ppools could do so (in theory).
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That doesn't sound right at all. A solution with a different payout address would no longer be valid. Also they are spending hash power so it's not parasiting. At most it will cause the pools luck to appear to be bad but since P2P users have altruistic reasons it isn't likely to cause them to switch.
I appreciate very much the fact checking peer review.
Perhaps you do not understand well the "Share Withholding Attack" which is called
Block Withholding in Meni Rosenfeld's whitepaper in the context of the decentralized pool case. And Rosenfeld's says "Sabotage" gives no benefit to the attacker. That is not correct in the decentralized case, because there is no way to hide the transactions and block details from the attacker for a decentralized pool (because there is no centrally trusted entity to hold the secret until the block solution is found), thus the attacker can submit the block solutions as his own (never giving them to the P2Ppool) and receive all the coin rewards instead of sharing them with the P2Ppool. In the decentralized P2Ppool case, each peer must adds its payout address thus the block has being calculated is different for each peer. The attacker will give to the P2Ppool the shares that are not block solutions, thus parasiting by receiving a portion of the coin rewards gained from the hash rate of the other peers in the pool when the block solution is found by other peers, but not reciprocating because the attacker keeps the coin rewards for block solutions he finds all to himself.
Please let me know if that caused you to understand, or if you still disagree?
A very thorough explanation which layman could grasp would take me a day or days to produce. I would need graphical illustrations as well.
51%50+% attack is an overblown problem anyways. As you stated yourself government actors have better tools to combat bitcoin and for private attackers it is simply not economically viable.
Perhaps so for Bitcoin because the government has an easier way to attack, yet if Bitcoin's coin taint anonymity is ever fix (see upthread the
interview with Adam Back) the 50+% attack comes back to prominence. And for the proposed altcoin, the 50+% attack needs to be analyzed because the government loses some (most or all?) of its ability to attack with regulation due to the strong anonymity.