Yep, obviously the incentive system of bitcoin is deeply flawed.
It's interesting to see that the market price is completely decoupled from such problems coming into public attention...
I'm holding on to my stash for now, but unless the network is hard-forked to solve this issue (and other major ones on the way), I don't see a real future for bitcoin anymore.
The price could still hit $20k, but the coin would be tightly controlled by then if mining remains centralized.
> Yep, obviously the incentive system of bitcoin is deeply flawed.
Then how do you explain that apparent lack (or at least, very low rate) of such attacks? It seems to me that what we observe is evidence against your description of the incentives.
They did occur, but yes, at a very low rate. The rate will increase once the people with guns realize the benefit of such attacks. This is not the case now, but it will be the case if the price continues to rise.
Imagine that 2 court orders (one to GHash, one to the next largest pool) are enough to reverse a transaction, or to "freeze funds" by not allowing TXs from a certain key.
If the incentive system encouraged independent mining, this would not be possible.
> It's interesting to see that the market price is completely decoupled from such problems coming into public attention...
It's seems "decoupled" because investors know that there is a fairly high chance that the problems will be fixed when it becomes apparent that it's posing a serious threat. Ultimately what Bitcoin is is a social consensus, and that social consensus has rapidly changed before in the face of exploits and will probably do so again. Secondly, at a technical level solving the flawed incentives can be done in a backwards compatible soft-fork upgrade - a hard-fork where everyone upgrades at once is not required, which makes agreeing to and deploying such a change significantly easier.
It's interesting to see that the market price is completely decoupled from such problems coming into public attention...
I'm holding on to my stash for now, but unless the network is hard-forked to solve this issue (and other major ones on the way), I don't see a real future for bitcoin anymore.
The price could still hit $20k, but the coin would be tightly controlled by then if mining remains centralized.