Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn Are Sabotaging Bitcoin

That's already happened: Chinese controlled mining pools control >50% of the hash rate and could do serious damage to Bitcoin (or even fork it) if they really wanted to and were willing to take a short-term loss for a long-term power play. At the very least they could hold Bitcoin hostage by merely "threatening to threaten" to do this, since any such threat could tank its value. Speculative markets are hypersensitive to FUD in the short term if that FUD is even a little bit credible, therefore anyone with the power to FUD a market has tremendous power to manipulate that market. (That's why securities markets are studded with laws to try to prevent that... not that these laws work all that well.)

If other groups of super-rich/powerful elites wanted to control Bitcoin all they'd need to do is to buy similar levels of compute power and centralize it. If there is some Rothschild banking elite conspiracy, do you really think they can't afford a lot of ASIC silicon? They could also afford significantly faster non-great-firewalled Internet connections than the Chinese.

Bitcoin's proof-of-work mining scheme intrinsically favors centralized economies of scale for the same reason this kind of industrial-scale compute centralization is favored in cloud computing. The more compute you can put in one place the cheaper cooling, power, and system administration becomes per compute unit. All industrial processes are like this to some extent, and the effect is exponential.

But I wasn't even really speaking to that. I was speaking of how he copypastas old JBS conspiracy theories. There's this crowd who thinks they are "thinking for themselves" by rejecting the mainstream narrative and plugging into alternative and underground media, but most of them just end up uncritically accepting anything their new media feeds say. It's just as easy to propagandize the alt/underground scene as it is to propagandize the mainstream... maybe even easier since it's a lot cheaper to influence or astroturf indie media than it is to influence the New York Times. So you have lefties and anarcho/libertarian types running around parroting narratives originally penned by the John Birch Society and neo-Nazi groups without having any clue as to the pedigree of these ideas. Strange days.