These discussions seem fairly relevant now:<p><a href="https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=393815.0" rel="nofollow">https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=393815.0</a><p><a href="https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=399313.0" rel="nofollow">https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=399313.0</a><p>"...if every bank vault in the world had a vulnerability that you (and only you) could exploit, possibly without detection (or at least with a degree of deniability)... what would you do?"<p>Most people wouldn't immediately do the (irrational) thing and abuse that power on a large scale because obviously, the global instability/problems would outweigh the rewards.<p>"Sooner or later, if given the opportunity to take unfair advantage of the system day after day, month after month, I think a lot of otherwise "trustworthy" people/organizations will end up giving in, albeit in subtle ways at first. Most people left to their own devices wouldn't flip a switch (for a reward) to immediately contaminate all of the world's fresh water at once, but if given a million switches each of which contaminates just 1 millionth of the world's fresh water for a substantial reward... I think there'd be some serious switch-flipping going on."<p>The problem with Bitcoin (as described in the original Bitcoin paper) is that Satoshi apparently didn't account for the very real likelihood of pools gaining substantial amounts of power.<p>"If a greedy attacker is able to assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes..." sounds like a very remote possibility in the context of a world where every miner operates independently, and if pools didn't exist, it probably would be very unlikely. If every miner truly controlled his or her own mining power, I doubt we'd ever run into this problem.