Quote from: deslok on October 12, 2011, 11:46:19 PM

It's possible this is not a "51% attack" but something much simpler, bringing down a pool as large as deepbit, slush or btc guild this close to a difficulty change will 1, decrease the number of new blocks found slowing the flow of new blocks into exchanges theoretically temporarily stabilizing the prices(this would happen at any point a major pool went offline however) and 2 cause the difficulty drop to be longer than normal by affecting the blocks/hour ratio even if done for a day this would cause a greater than predicted difficulty drop and allow said attacker to mine more coins than prior during the next cycle

I like you conspiracy theories Deslok! Plus, less difficulty is hard to hate.
Question, is it better to point small (~2 Ghash) guns at a operating pool during times like this, or is it better to go solo? My line of thinking is it's better to be in a pool because you'll contribute to solving a block faster, and that's what effectively hinders any 51% bs. Going solo with anything less than 10 Ghash seems wasteful of precious block solving time.

BTW, I'm at BTC Guild for now.