Aren't the "guy in a dorm-room" operations already pretty much out of the game? Couldn't GHash.io do pretty much whatever they want with the blockchain at this point?
Yup. As a self-described guy in a dorm room throwing his single GPU cycles at some crypto for self-education purposes, people are using multi-coin pools that mine ASIC-resistant coins and flip around depending on which is most profitable (often monero/litecoin).
That said, pools like nicehash pay out in BTC anyways, effectively locking altcoins to the BTC index price. Where goes bitcoin, so goes the market.
