[sytelus]

I think the fundamental problem OP puts here is that true power always seem to be in hands of few - whether its physical currency or crypto currency. Look at it this way: Every currency needs to have attribute of being produced through some work. However ultimately most of the work is owned by who have wealth or power. Thus no matter what currency one comes up with, ultimately few handful of wealthy individuals or governments can completely control its production as well as evolution. In Bitcoin case, few governments or individuals can own 95% of the production capacity because that's the proportion of wealth/power they own. So fundamental premise that general population's computing power would outweigh computing power of governments/wealthy is wrong due to simple fact of inequality that necessarily has to exist. No amount of forking would prevent this scenario to occur again.

[sail]

Could one design against this?

[joatmon-snoo]

That was sort of the idea of BTC, that a decentralized currency would mitigate this. Nakomoto's original paper actually devotes some attention to this, discussing why they don't want to rely on a centralized authority, and in the introduction he writes:

> What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.

The thing that jumps out to me the most at this point is that Nakomoto also wrote:

> The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes.

And with Heard's article, presuming that the facts are true, which seems to very much be the case, this seems to me the most serious risk to the system.