> This means that now not everyone has the internet connection or the disk space to keep a copy of the block chain, and more control is in the hands of the mine

> This means that now not everyone has the internet connection or the disk space to keep a copy of the block chain, and more control is in the hands of the miners. Isn't this inevitable? Once demand of anything increases beyond a certain threshold, individuals can no longer supply enough of that thing to satisfy that demand, because they are overwhelmed by the costs of logistics, storage, maintenance and so on. In the case of bitcoin, I imagine that soon you'll need to have dedicated machines for this task. Not a lot of people can afford to have one - or several, for redundancy - machines to do it. Hence, the "power" - like in anything else - is in the hands of those that are willing to make a significant investment to keep things running. The payoff for them is that they can profit from providing this service. If I understand correctly, this comes in the form of transaction fees. Or did you think that bitcoin could rise to the level of, say, Visa or Paypal on the backs of volunteers? Bitcoin isn't even "mainstream" yet, and the network is already buckling. I think this outcome was more than predictable.