The relatively new mid-sized mining pool ViaBTC (WOT:nonpeople) recently announced it is mining blocks expressing support for the latest effort to fork an altcoin away from actual Bitcoin. ViaBTC throughout its short history has climbed to represent ~10 percent of the Bitcoin network's hashrate. The only other pool to announce any form of support for this latest social engineering assault on Bitcoin was Roger Ver's (WOT:nonperson) own pool which languishes at ~1 percent of the network's hash rate in spite of paying miners ~6 percent more than they should be making for mining with that pool.
The plainly counter economic activity in support of this latest social engineering attempt suggests that the United States government and its other criminal agents of fiat are still sinking ever more precious resources into their attempts to cripple Bitcoin. The arrogance of this move also suggests Blockstream, the other camp of social engineers seeking to pervert Bitcoin, is likely to begin spearheading a substantial push for something soon.
2013's future of Bitcoin regulation is the present, Republican, reality of Bitcoin regulation. The unforgiving march of time is eroding the few remaining refuges of the delusionist profession which is likely to result in increasingly desperate efforts1 to combat the march of inevitability.
Leading this is the failure of the "Ethereum" gambit where a competitor to Bitcoin was supposed which included numerous features that in reality serve as little more than vectors for attack. ↩