It is called a 51% attack. Yes they can, with less than 100 millions $  they can buy enough ASICs to do that.

And it would be much more effective than trying to "ban" it or try to "manipulate" it

Hell, just look at what is happening, a single pool without even trying has almost reached 51% of total hashrate, so long for people that say "nah a 51% attack is so hard to do it is impossible"

What if Satoshi was a fictional character created by the Central Bank?

"WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU??? HOW IN THE NAME OF CHRIST CAN YOU BUY $40 Billion of bitcoins at $900 each??? Hahahhaaaaa you are hilarious. I don't know if you are just trolling or you really have no idea that there are buy and sell orders for limited amounts of bitcoins on the exchanges. I would guess trolling..."

:-) I did not say that they would buy 40 bln in one time.
They could buy slow in low volumes and then dump it all at once.
Again and again.
Each time causing a small crash.
This is how you could manipulate a price in all kind of markets.

** I am long on BTC, but wanted to check / discuss this scenario **

still  strange that the confirmed earnings are not showing up in ´account´

For Slush members wondering what is going on with threshold delayed payments...

"Typically, the pool sends confirmed rewards which are over threshold to users every hour.

For security reasons, the server's hot wallet (keeping funds immediately available for payouts) has quite a low balance. When the hot wallet becomes empty, the pool administrator has to load the wallet from the cold storage (a highly secured offline computer keeping pool's bitcoins). Since this process cannot be automated and only very limited number of people has an access to cold wallet, it can introduce a few hours' delay in sending coins to user's wall


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