So I was thinking, "Wouldn't the people in the pool just opt out as they're obviously enthusiests?" Sure enough I see in the article a bit down the page:<p>"As soon as the Bitcoin community realized what was happening at GHash, "independent" miners who'd subscribed to the collective removed their computers from the pool."
How can the bitcoin network verify that two or more hashing pools whose total hashing power are greater than 51% are not secretly colluding behind the scenes?
This reminds me of a story of the the dot com bubble. An investor hears his parents are investing in dot com and they do not own a computer or have any idea what it is. they simply buy because the prices are going up and everyone else around them is buying. He got worried sick and dumped all his shares.<p>Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. I feel that bitcoin, while it has the place in the right heart, is not going to survive when it wipes out people's value. Then the media will go insane about how they can't trust cryptocurrencies ever again and a new one emerge. The government fully is aware of this, and it's in their best interest to let it crash, let people discredit it with their own hard earned money.