Quote from: realnowhereman on May 01, 2012, 08:14:03 PM

Let's say I am a merchant, and you use your nefarious powers to subvert 99% of the mining power. You still cannot force my client to accept your block with bad rules and therefore my client will never say "received 1000 coins from..." so you can't spend them even if you do get them in a chain.

This is an interesting issue. However, I do not yet fully understand your line of reasoning.

Assume I subvert 99% of the mining power and use it to mine an incompatible block chain. The effect is that the "old" chain speed will drop to 1% (rendering it essentially useless - and staying useless during at least several difficulty adjustment periods) whereas "my" chain will continue mining at more or less full speed.

Now a social effect kicks in. Numerous other users will notice that their clients cannot get any transaction done (since chain speed is too slow). On my website they will read this dossier about the Bitcoin 2.0 protocol. They will checkout Bitcoin 2.0 block explorer and will witness how the new chain is working (remember, I have 99% of hash performance, so I will of course also generate a lot of transactional traffic between all kinds of new bitcoin addresses). Quite soon users will be convinced that Bitcoin 2.0 is the arena where the show goes on and that "old" chain no longer is attractive nor active. So, more and more users will use my Bitcoin 2.0 client and will be happy.

You are, of course, perfectly free to stay with your Bitoin 1.0 client and with a chain, which not only lacks hashing power but also rapidly uses users. You also can fight back by writing forum articles that I am a bad guy and all kinds of stuff - and of course you will be right with that. However: I will claim that you are just trying to ruin Bitcoin 2.0 - and my proof will be a nicely working block chain 2.0 with lots of transactions going on.

Maybe there is a flaw in my thoughts. I would be happy if you pointed it out.