This sucks.

$5000 a day business! Worth creating a botnet for ($1.8million a year!).

Bet they are monitoring the forum and already writing the code to "hide" better. i.e. include some transactions and vary the ip address a bit.

I for one welcome our new Spanish overlords.

Not a big deal if you are using the system to make send payments or speculate. However, if you are currently mining, it is a big deal.  It is a matter of time before this guy/group or someone like this guy/group chooses to exclude blocks found by other miners.  All they need is 51%. The days of profitable, independent mining are numbered.

I hope these people are also ASIC manufacturers because that would be really funny.

1) Sell a bunch of expensive mining hardware to lone miners to recoup development costs.
2) Maintain a dominant residual share of this hardware.
3) Use the dominant share to shut out all the suckers who purchased mining equipment from you.
4) You have all newly mined coins and revenue from equipment sales. Your customers have worthless hardware.

Why would value plummet, if the practical usefulness of the txn medium for users remains unaffected? Will the silk road users refuse to buy drugs using coins controlled by a 51%? Should speculators anticipate this mass protest and sell? Is there an economic logic behind this, or is it just the conventional wisdom?

If it's for profit, then it's not feasible to kill the system, that brings you that profit. If it's a gov contract to kill bitcoin, then that's the aim - get 51%. Wanna bet which one it is? 

One answer can be found this post: https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/66514.msg775108#msg775108

It's defense, not attack.  And it will certainly not continue forever.  Once the vulnerability can be fixed, it will stop.

Quite the spin.  One can oppose BIP16 and still include transactions.  Interesting you oppose BIP16 and thus see everything (even something as stupid as 1 tx blocks) as opposition.

Your link doesn't support anything you just said.

Gavin simply advised not to "vote" in favor of p2sh unless you are p2sh capable.  There is no issue with a solo miner processing transactions.  If running old non p2sh capable bitcoin they will see p2sh transactions as invalid.

If the mystery solo miner was including all transactions EXCEPT p2sh ones it would have some validity.  There is absolutely no reason to exclude all transactions to "stop" p2sh support.  Eligus for example doesn't support p2sh and processes transactions in every block.   Your full of crap jetmine.  Stop reaching for conclusions that aren't there.

On edit:  looks like the mystery miner supports p2sh.

coinbase: 040c350b1a028d06062f503253482f
decoded: 5�/P2SH/

http://blockchain.info/tx-index/3325470/26df9b84d9346393cbe4ba00f907aacfe7ff2f832049d6ebd66a515d5ac6a709

It is causing confusion because it looks like Deepbit supports p2sh but it is only because "mystery" is only broadcasting blocks to other pools and thus those pools are relaying them to blockchain.info.  So "mystery" blocks appear to blockchain.info as coming from Deepbit and other pools.

On edit edit: maybe not.  Other miners may be relaying through deepbit. Hard to say if the p2sh blocks shown "from" Deepbit are from mystery or another miner.