Given that there has been a 8x growth in price, miners must still be profitable at this point? If I were an ASIC supplier, I would be delaying shipping and "alpha testing" those hardware in times like this
Genuine question: Does this mean Btc is not so decentralized after all? Could they possibly decide one day to release an update to exercise ultimate control/power over btc?
It's certainly a point of trust, but ultimately it's the miners who decide how Bitcoin works. So far this has predominantly worked by them using software from bitcoin.org and upgrading it relatively frequently, but this would probably change very quickly once they stop thinking of the bitcoin.org developers as working in their interest.
The corruption explained there matched the pattern seen in representative cases supplied by the core team.
The core team may not have yet awarded the bounty, and there were a few other possibly contributing factors regarding proper use of LevelDB on OSX before the above work... but there's certainly a strong case made that a real fix has been discovered and deployed.
Seems kind if weird that Bitcoin (actually bitcoind) itself would be dependent on a google-developed database solution that isn't open source, and not only that, has non-determinate behavior, depending on the host system..
I was assuming you were mistaken, but it's starting to look like you're just making things up. LevelDB has no dependencies other the Snappy compression codec, which is both optional and BSD-licensed.
The fine article does not describe indeterminate platform-specific behavior within LevelDB. I assume you are talking about Mac corruption fix which Robert Escriva put in. This problem was with the behavior of munmap on Darwin, and did not result in the leveldb database being in a usable platform-specific state.
The leap in difficulty must mean all the 500-600Ghash/sec 28nm ASICs are coming online.