I think this is what makes me nervous about electronic currencies. A country, even just a person, could easily abuse it by throwing these huge machines at it.

I think this is what makes me nervous about electronic currencies. A country, even just a person, could easily abuse it by throwing these huge machines at it. The only thing analogous to this with real currencies are printing presses that people somehow get a hold of and are able to print themselves. The nice thing about real currency though is we have some ways of knowing whether they're real or not (like looking under a light), but you can't really determine whether someone's bitcoins came from abuse because technically it's legit. Only solution I could think of would be if there's a way for the networks to have throttling so miners could only make so many per day or per hour or some other metric.