[jasode]

>Was this predicted at the inception of Bitcoin?

It was not predicted in the original Bitcoin whitepaper. Yes, it discussed the theoretical feasibility of a 50+% attack to double-spend but it didn't explicitly predict a "consolidation" to specialized hardware miners that leaves out the miners at home using regular computers.

>It's interesting how economics impacts the security of the protocol like this.

Every decentralized protocol suffers from unintended centralization caused by economics. The same thing happened to other protocols like NNTP (Usenet), SMTP, HTTP+HTML, and Git.

The underlying issue is that technical protocols still have to be realized on real hardware like cpus + harddrives + network bandwidth and consume real costs like human labor. You can decentralize a protocol specification but you can't decentralize the amount of money different entities are willing to spend on that protocol. Each protocol whether NNTP/SMTP/Git/bitcoin does not come with a $1 million grant for homeowners to spend at Newegg to keep protocols decentralized.

That's why protocols consolidate towards big players in a power law distribution.

[seanwilson]

> It was not predicted in the original Bitcoin whitepaper.

> Every decentralized protocol suffers from unintended centralization caused by economics.

> That's why protocols consolidate towards big players in a power law distribution.

Hmm, given the amount of foresight in the original whitepaper I'm surprised the current situation wasn't predicted especially if it's common with other protocols that are intended to be decentralized.

[dyeje]

It could have been foreseen and omitted. We still don't know who Satoshi is or what their motivations are.