Quote from: Prayer on February 13, 2014, 09:17:38 PM

This is where Bitcoin is headed if we only have a small handful of pool operators controlling the global hash power. What if those few decided to get together and issue a code update that allows them to generate all the BTC they wanted.

Every full node checks the validity of the coinbase transaction. SPV nodes currently don't, but they could if we switch to using Merkle sum trees.

The power that miners have over the network is strictly limited to choosing the transaction ordering. Their attacks are limited to denial of service (mining empty blocks), double spending (chain reorgs), and censorship (selective rejection of transactions for political reasons).

But even this rests on the assumption that the folks running non-mining, verifying nodes are economically significant enough as a whole to resist miner fraud.