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The article seems to focus on China's share of the miners, so I'll address that: I'm not that concerned about the Chinese miners. If they wanted to disrupt the

The article seems to focus on China's share of the miners, so I'll address that: I'm not that concerned about the Chinese miners. If they wanted to disrupt the network they have had plenty of chances to. The author assumes that all Chinese miners are controlled by the same entity. Which, while I do believe that the Chinese govt. can shutdown any miner they want to, I don't believe that 100% of the miners are operated by the Chinese govt. If you break down the pie chart into the different Chinese entities that actually operate the miners it begins to look more decentralized. After reading the paper that was posted here the other week about forking the network using BGP to effectively create two sepereate Internets, I think that if a country did go rouge, we could all just set our firewalls to drop all connections from Chinese nodes and that would be that. Let them run their own chain where they can manipulate their coins price like the do the yuan.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
homakov 9y ago
>If they wanted to disrupt the network they have had plenty of chances to. "If paypal wanted to ban my account they would do it already. Must be secure to store all my money there then". >If you break down the pie chart into the different Chinese entities that actually operate the miners it begins to look more decentralized. The 4th chart is actually the official hashrate distribution from https://blockchain.info/pools https://blockchain.info/pools I never said they are operated by the gov, __they are under its authority__. Because that's how govs worked for ages. >I think that if a country did go rouge, we could all just set our firewalls to drop all connections from Chinese nodes and that would be that. "We would just change PoW". "We would just cut off China from Internet". Just do a thought experiment - those are not solutions
- colemannugent 9y ago
  >"If paypal wanted to ban my account they would do it already. Must be secure to store all my money there then". Why wait for a longer chain? What do they stand to gain? Act now and secure control. If the network is a vulnerable as you say, why has China not made their move? They control a majority of miners, they control their country completely and even manipulate their traditional currency to stay competitive economically, why would they not seize control over the network before it the US govt. becomes interested in protecting it? >"The 4th chart is actually the official hashrate distribution from https://blockchain.info/pools" https://blockchain.info/pools" Right, but pool membership is voluntary. If a pool doesn't act in support of its miners then the miners will go elsewhere. Pools are like political parties, centralized in appearance, but if you ask the members of a party what they think you quickly see that they never agree on everything. >I never said they are operated by the gov, __they are under its authority__. Because that's how govs worked for ages. Which is the crux of the issue. As long as the Chinese person running the miner can point their miner at a different pool or switch software then the government does not control the miners. I'm not current on the state of Chinese political affairs, but I was under the impression that they are not that authoritarian. Knowing that, you cannot count all those pools as agents of the Chinese govt. and can't make an argument that they are centralized. Just because their best financial interests align currently does not mean they will be aligned in the future. In my estimation, the Chinese govt. is losing its grip on the Chinese economy, which leads me to believe that in the future the contral govt. will have even less ability to manipulate like they do now. >"We would just change PoW". "We would just cut off China from Internet". Just do a thought experiment - those are not solutions Except the "cut China off from the internet" is feasible, see this paper on the impact BGP hijacking could have on the network: https://btc-hijack.ethz.ch/ https://btc-hijack.ethz.ch/. By your definition, nothing is a solution until implemented, which I think is a bit silly. Of course we couldn't completely separate the Chinese miners from the wider Internet, but we could make any attacks on the wider network so hard to achive that the electricity they would waste trying to attack us would cost them more than being a good cryptocitizen would make them. But then again, this is just an artifact of democracy when you replace citizens with CPUs. If more miners support one chain, that is the legitimate chain. That's what's outlined in the Bitcoin paper. This seems more like a political issue than a technological one.
  - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
    nodes define and police consensus in bitcoin, not miners.
    - colemannugent 9y ago
      True, I do conflate the two. But the article was about hashrate, and you do need enormous hashrate to modify even one past block. Attacks of that kind are fairly unreasonable, even on the scale of the Chinese govt. Would I be wrong to think that every miner (or at least every entity who is mining, not nessesarily every computer that is mining) would have a vested interest in running a full node as well? That would put control of the nodes in roughly the same hands as those who control the miners right?
      - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
        It doesn't matter. It only matters which nodes are used to record transactions on the blockchain. You can have a million nodes, but unless those nodes are recording transactions on the blockchain, it matters not.
tlrobinson 9y ago
> we could all just set our firewalls to drop all connections from Chinese nodes and that would be that That's not how it works. All it takes is a single connection bridging the partition for a chain with more work to replace your chain. That connection could be through a VPN, Tor, a satellite (https://blockstream.com/satellite/ https://blockstream.com/satellite/), or someone physically carrying a USB drive containing a better chain across the border and starting up a node. Honeybadger chain don't give a shit.
- colemannugent 9y ago
  VPN and Tor are still vulnerable to something like this: https://btc-hijack.ethz.ch/ https://btc-hijack.ethz.ch/, but satellite, that's pretty cool! I guess if a country wanted to they could jam satellite communications, close their borders and cut all major fiber lines, but that still wouldn't stop the ham radio folks from running pirate stations broadcasting blockchain updates lol. Thanks for the correction!
  - tlrobinson 9y ago
    That paper actually specifically mentions VPNs as a countermeasure to BGP attacks: Increase the diversity of node connections. The more connected an AS is, the harder it is to attack it. We therefore encourage Bitcoin node owners to ensure they are multi-homed. Observe that even single-homed Bitcoin nodes could benefit from extra connectivity by using one or more VPN services through encrypted tunnels so that Bitcoin traffic to and from the node go through multiple and distinct ASes. Attackers that wish to deny connectivity through the tunnel would need to either know both associated IP addresses or, alternatively, disrupt all encrypted traffic to and from nodes— making the attack highly noticeable. Ham radio is another great idea. It’s a bit of a gray area, at last in the US where commercial use and encryption (but not digital signatures) is prohibited. Transmitting block headers may not strictly be against the letter of the law. The transactions themselves though probably would be. I’ve been meaning to set up a service listening on APRS-IS (http://www.aprs-is.net/ http://www.aprs-is.net/) that rebroadcasts transactions to the Bitcoin network. I don’t think such a service would violate the regulations, but users who wish to use it would be responsible for ensuring their transactions did not (if that’s even possible)
rapsey 9y ago
How about Blockstream employs the core developers and controls the largest social communities. So yeah it is pretty centralized.
- Frogolocalypse 9y ago
  Node owners, the peers in the peer-to-peer cash of bitcoin, laugh at your understanding of bitcoin.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

homakov 9y ago

>If they wanted to disrupt the network they have had plenty of chances to. "If paypal wanted to ban my account they would do it already. Must be secure to store all my money there then". >If you break down the pie chart into the different Chinese entities that actually operate the miners it begins to look more decentralized. The 4th chart is actually the official hashrate distribution from https://blockchain.info/pools https://blockchain.info/pools I never said they are operated by the gov, __they are under its authority__. Because that's how govs worked for ages. >I think that if a country did go rouge, we could all just set our firewalls to drop all connections from Chinese nodes and that would be that. "We would just change PoW". "We would just cut off China from Internet". Just do a thought experiment - those are not solutions

colemannugent 9y ago
>"If paypal wanted to ban my account they would do it already. Must be secure to store all my money there then". Why wait for a longer chain? What do they stand to gain? Act now and secure control. If the network is a vulnerable as you say, why has China not made their move? They control a majority of miners, they control their country completely and even manipulate their traditional currency to stay competitive economically, why would they not seize control over the network before it the US govt. becomes interested in protecting it? >"The 4th chart is actually the official hashrate distribution from https://blockchain.info/pools" https://blockchain.info/pools" Right, but pool membership is voluntary. If a pool doesn't act in support of its miners then the miners will go elsewhere. Pools are like political parties, centralized in appearance, but if you ask the members of a party what they think you quickly see that they never agree on everything. >I never said they are operated by the gov, __they are under its authority__. Because that's how govs worked for ages. Which is the crux of the issue. As long as the Chinese person running the miner can point their miner at a different pool or switch software then the government does not control the miners. I'm not current on the state of Chinese political affairs, but I was under the impression that they are not that authoritarian. Knowing that, you cannot count all those pools as agents of the Chinese govt. and can't make an argument that they are centralized. Just because their best financial interests align currently does not mean they will be aligned in the future. In my estimation, the Chinese govt. is losing its grip on the Chinese economy, which leads me to believe that in the future the contral govt. will have even less ability to manipulate like they do now. >"We would just change PoW". "We would just cut off China from Internet". Just do a thought experiment - those are not solutions Except the "cut China off from the internet" is feasible, see this paper on the impact BGP hijacking could have on the network: https://btc-hijack.ethz.ch/ https://btc-hijack.ethz.ch/. By your definition, nothing is a solution until implemented, which I think is a bit silly. Of course we couldn't completely separate the Chinese miners from the wider Internet, but we could make any attacks on the wider network so hard to achive that the electricity they would waste trying to attack us would cost them more than being a good cryptocitizen would make them. But then again, this is just an artifact of democracy when you replace citizens with CPUs. If more miners support one chain, that is the legitimate chain. That's what's outlined in the Bitcoin paper. This seems more like a political issue than a technological one.
- Frogolocalypse 9y ago
  nodes define and police consensus in bitcoin, not miners.
  - colemannugent 9y ago
    True, I do conflate the two. But the article was about hashrate, and you do need enormous hashrate to modify even one past block. Attacks of that kind are fairly unreasonable, even on the scale of the Chinese govt. Would I be wrong to think that every miner (or at least every entity who is mining, not nessesarily every computer that is mining) would have a vested interest in running a full node as well? That would put control of the nodes in roughly the same hands as those who control the miners right?
    - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
      It doesn't matter. It only matters which nodes are used to record transactions on the blockchain. You can have a million nodes, but unless those nodes are recording transactions on the blockchain, it matters not.

tlrobinson 9y ago

> we could all just set our firewalls to drop all connections from Chinese nodes and that would be that That's not how it works. All it takes is a single connection bridging the partition for a chain with more work to replace your chain. That connection could be through a VPN, Tor, a satellite (https://blockstream.com/satellite/ https://blockstream.com/satellite/), or someone physically carrying a USB drive containing a better chain across the border and starting up a node. Honeybadger chain don't give a shit.

colemannugent 9y ago
VPN and Tor are still vulnerable to something like this: https://btc-hijack.ethz.ch/ https://btc-hijack.ethz.ch/, but satellite, that's pretty cool! I guess if a country wanted to they could jam satellite communications, close their borders and cut all major fiber lines, but that still wouldn't stop the ham radio folks from running pirate stations broadcasting blockchain updates lol. Thanks for the correction!
- tlrobinson 9y ago
  That paper actually specifically mentions VPNs as a countermeasure to BGP attacks: Increase the diversity of node connections. The more connected an AS is, the harder it is to attack it. We therefore encourage Bitcoin node owners to ensure they are multi-homed. Observe that even single-homed Bitcoin nodes could benefit from extra connectivity by using one or more VPN services through encrypted tunnels so that Bitcoin traffic to and from the node go through multiple and distinct ASes. Attackers that wish to deny connectivity through the tunnel would need to either know both associated IP addresses or, alternatively, disrupt all encrypted traffic to and from nodes— making the attack highly noticeable. Ham radio is another great idea. It’s a bit of a gray area, at last in the US where commercial use and encryption (but not digital signatures) is prohibited. Transmitting block headers may not strictly be against the letter of the law. The transactions themselves though probably would be. I’ve been meaning to set up a service listening on APRS-IS (http://www.aprs-is.net/ http://www.aprs-is.net/) that rebroadcasts transactions to the Bitcoin network. I don’t think such a service would violate the regulations, but users who wish to use it would be responsible for ensuring their transactions did not (if that’s even possible)

rapsey 9y ago

How about Blockstream employs the core developers and controls the largest social communities. So yeah it is pretty centralized.

Frogolocalypse 9y ago
Node owners, the peers in the peer-to-peer cash of bitcoin, laugh at your understanding of bitcoin.