Why did you even mention other things if you didn't want to hear comments about them? Of course the risk of a 51% attack exists and building it up slowly is possible. I'd advise every miner who paid off the rig and is making some BTC now to invest them in something like photovoltaics (or anything else that produces electricity) to keep the risk of "going bankrupt" in mining at almost 0%.

No malice intended, but you don't realize that investing in PV is economically worse than renting electricity from the utility. You will go bankrupt faster.

Let's say you're correct that the cartel effectively controls all mining power. In order for them to use it effectively they must be able to distinguish between their friends and their enemies. But there's no way to do that.

If they choose to assume anyone they haven't identified is an enemy, the public will quickly abandon the whole system, causing the exchange value to plummet. That's bad economics.

Bitcoin is just the first head of a Hydra. If it gets compromised over overtaken it can be abandoned and replaced with incredible speed. The cartels get left holding all the worthless currency and useless mining hardware.

Technically it may be a logical outcome, but how will the alpha-males work harmoniously together to form and continue this cartel?

On world-scale there exists no such 51%-entity, AFAIK. Human nature breaks organisations down internally long before world domination and after a break they will compete which each other, since they both think they are on the right track.

The largest companies and countries are small at the global scale, only one's exposure to one of them can be particularly large. So Bitcoin can be sufficiently protected by size and dispersity.

It doesn't make it completely free, but much cheaper and most importantly independent from price changes on electricity. Where's your cartel that is "giving away mining for free"? It doesn't exist. There's not a single bank that doesn't charge any fees. Make your cartel and see how "profitable" it is  

It will be too late. Please read my prior reply to joris.

And why not make it cartel-proof now? Why risk it?

There is something unique in my OP. What I am saying is not a 51% attack that does malicious actions. I am saying a 30 then 40 then 50 then 60 then 70 then 80 then 90 then 99 then 99.9999% friendly takeover of mining by corporations that make mining free and never do malicious acts.

No one will have a reason to switch.

Then they can turn off your access, because you wrote something that threatens the power elite. No one will care that you die. You are just one lone "terrorist". The rest of us are enjoying our junk and "free" transaction processing (because we can't see the opaque cost that has been added to everything in the market).

You see the problem, so you blog about it. Next day, your digital tax id is turned off. You die. No one cares. We won't even know it. You won't be able to even upload your blog, because by that time you have to make a micropayment to the hosting.

I have studied the power elite. I know how they operate. They do things insidiously so the masses don't know they've been enslaved.

Do you own the domain name? quibic.org?

Their friends are those who report taxes. Those who don't are enemies. Very easy to identify. Once they have the "friendly" takeover of mining, they can slowly morph the system to what they want with tax id attached to every transaction (either explicitly in the database or implicitly in the AML controls and other ways they can know exactly what every transaction is).

The public won't abandon it, because the public won't even perceive they've been harmed. They will happily buy their junk and be unaffected. Only the dissidants will be purged (the ones who think too much).

This will be a slow process, most will say I was crazy, because they won't perceive it is happening over decades. Slowly the dissidants will be picked off, a few at a time. We lose our freedom, bit-by-bit, not all at once. The power elite are not stupid enough to risk it all at once.

Cartels work together because they can earn more rents together than separate. They eliminate competition which drives their rents up (competition drives rents down). So the strongest get together.

Over time, the cartels consolidate more, eliminating the weakest within them. They end up as a single controller, which of course is failure, because no single person can run a free market.

Thus they are ultimately == death (for everyone). If it goes that far. Usually before that, mankind will cut off their heads (e.g. in France), but the problem this time is they are far away. Everything is digital. We can't even find them.

This horrifies me.

I think you should go study how Rockefeller monopolized all oil and railroads in USA, if you believe cartels don't form naturally when the economics allow it.

I am proposing to change the design so that the economics will no longer allow it. Bitcoin allows it. My design does not.

Sir in all due respect, you fail to understand the threat I am explaining.

The mining won't be decentralized anymore, because the cartels will give it away for free.