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Big Barry Bitcoin | 6 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag +1 
 That is scarily bullish and bearish at the same time. Unless we can say the same of the effect of people that we can say of the effect of governments, then miners may just turn into the new ruling class if governments were ever to become overthrown and bitcoin were to become the money.
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waxwing | 6 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 Right, good point ... if the state doesn't do our dirty  work for us ("firing" some miners from time to time), we might have to do it ourselves!

The ghash case was interesting, but people over-interpreted it as "oh the market will just correct if anyone hits 50%". clearly not true.

The deeper point: bitcoin is an intrinsically identity-less system, and this means that it will always be fundamentally *impossible* to measure mining centralization occurring, with certainty. The recent example of coinbase tx consolidation just illustrates that it's a matter of luck, or bad opsec, if we do "measure" it. And this means we can only really have arguments about the *effects* of centralization - most specifically transaction inclusion. This limitation will apply to the community trying to 'police' centralization just as it applies to the state trying to leverage centralization.