[hasch]

good point, but a mining monopoly would destroy the value and hence it's in the self-interest of miners to be diversified. that's an economical self-correcting mechanism on top of this technical mining/reward feedback mechanism.

[schmichael]

AFAIK this is the conventional wisdom but not a proven fact. A smart 51% attacker could profit and go unnoticed:

> And contrary to commonly-repeated assertions, a monopolist can engage in subtle attacks that are hard to detect.

http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/06/16/how-a-mining-monopo...