I think I lot of people don't understand how small bitcoin is. Our market cap is 240 usd x 14 million coins or 3 billion usd and some change.
I am a middle class usa guy and I can afford to buy 100,000 usd in gear and host it in china .
Lets say I get a deal and I get 333 s-5's for 100,000 that is 333 x 1.15 th or 385 th
385 th is 1/1000 of all the hash power in the network. So I could own 1/1000 of all the current hashpower.
Better yet I rented 1ph last night just to do this photo
that is me controlling 1ph for about 1 hour last nite that is ⅓ of 1 percent cost was just under .5 btc
I can rent 1 percent of the entire network for about an hour and point it at a non btc pool and drop the difficulty rate for some time.
So if I can rent 1 percent for 1 hour for 1.5 coins or 375 bucks others can do this. Did anyone notice that a guy was renting very big pieces of nice hash say 2ph for 1 day at a time. over paying to do it. say 0.0115 when it should be 0.0101.
If he pointed 2ph at an alternate coin but a 256 type he lowered the btc network.
If he is the owner of 20ph datacenter he could be doing this and it could help lower diff rate at a cheap cost.