Quote from: Roy Badami on July 23, 2014, 10:01:55 PM

Yes indeed. Satoshi's real genius was to create a system with the right incentives, at all levels.

Amen. A heartbreaking work of staggering genius. Mining decentralization has been the most persistently obvious weak point.

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As I said, this is still a "thought in progress". But I worry less about the evil SHA-256 ASIC plant then about the evil NSA CPU cluster.

This +1000.

The government actor is the only substantive challenge, and also the critical differentiator between BTC and XMR, for the highly competent actor: Anyone can run dark on the bitcoin chain, with comparable security probabilities to those enjoyed by a somewhat more naive XMR runner, if they apply layered technologies. Access and ease of use are the substantive differentiator for XMR, which will give it the bulk of the dark liquidity market. The bigger the money, the more desirable it is to capture that liquidity market. The bigger the money, the more important it is to harden against a nation-state actor. The biggest money will have a natural affinity for the most secure platform, and will use dark channels effectively, by means of high technical expertise, but the second tier of large money will be more important in aggregate, and will require ease of use, conjoined with robust cryptographic assurances. That tier will be seeking assurances which are responsive to nation-state threat models. XMR has the potential to meet this need, although it cannot now, and will benefit enormously from doing so. I keep emphasizing this, because incentives work wonders, but only if the relevant actors are aware of them, to be motivated accordingly.