I don't know what spurred it, but a couple of observations.

The "situation" caught my eye about a week ago, upon wanting to sell the remains of a generated block (after sending some away as donations) on "bitmarket.eu" to cover the purchase of some electric vehicle batteries.

- observing the situation, I could note that with the price increase, the market volume tended to decrease

- further, I could note that the mean size of a transaction tended to be 10 BTC

- I could observe no meaningful geographical pattern in ask vs. bid offers

- I could observe no meaningful transaction type pattern (local wire vs. international wire vs. paypal)

Either way, it looks like a deflationary spiral, and makes me concerned. What is causing the typical transaction size I don't know. I hope that people who sell goods and services can keep up with adjusting their prices downwards. Either way, such a rapid change in exchange rates is not contributing to a healthy and stress-free trading environment. I do hope this passes, but people's behaviour is hard to predict. It might slow down, it might burst like a bubble, it might do many things.. first time I see such a thing, and this ain't the most usual economy.

I don't know, but most anarchists appear willing to counter monopolies with some mixture of autonomy from them, boycott of their products and services (including deliberately paying a higher price for a more balanced future), competition with them, and sabotage of their infrastructure.

Furthermore, it might be argued that if anything with an "anarcho" prefix ends up as the prevalent or widespread attitude... then by definition, protections of certain privileges (like highly indirect ownership of far-away assets) is likely to be poorly recognized, if recognized at all. Not the best ground for monopoly-building.

Hey there, you need to syncronize your dogmas -- I thought AI was supposed to be our ally in the struggle for utopian anarchy?

True enough, searching for blocks is a practically stateless process. You only need an up-to-date block chain to start trying. Getting your block chain up-to-date if you've been offline for a day or so, only takes a few minutes (downloading and verifying the blocks).

There's also one more thing in bill's post which I'd like to clarify:

Strictly speaking, the network does not immediately "send" back anything like a reply. The rules of the Bitcoin protocol specify that the creator of the block *is* the owner of X bitcoins, and currently X equals 50.

The generator of the block claims ownership of 50 BTC, and the network confirms this in future blocks, which become available when generated, very likely by someone else. Future blocks will only confirm this *if* the generated block does verify as mathematically valid.

Those future blocks will however, eventually be downloaded by the generator of the block in question, and do serve the purpose of confirming that the network is accepting the generator's ownership of the coins.

P.S.

Getting back on topic, a single pool exceeding 50% of network capacity is a reason for concern. Good luck to alternative pool operators, I'll try to keep working as a solo miner. I can wait... I can wait very long... and I can run without interruption. Sadly not everyone can.

It furthermore appears that human nature is at work against decentralization here. Since people set out to generate blocks for a reward, they want certainty of getting *some* reward. This can only lead to pooling up, whether in smaller or bigger pools.

If people got accustomed to mining as a mostly-no-reward activity which *may* result in sudden, unplanned luck, perhaps they would be more inclined to mine alone.

Some day, it will need to start happening, and the everyday way of acquiring bitcoins will be buying them. (What happens when the block generation awards become so small that transaction fees start dominating, I won't try to predict.)