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I am the author. I'd love to understand your point. Can you give specifics? Thanks.

A2017U1 8y ago
You essentially point to a very large reorganisation and say all the tx's on the global chain will disappear once the GFW opens up again. All orphaned transactions go back in the mempool as unconfirmed and will be processed later. Simply blocking all global traffic already creates a huge monetary incentive for miners to sidestep the rules and it's easily achieved with obfuscated transports. Such an action would be noticeable and considered hostile. Were they causing network disruption you'd likely see a hardfork to memory hard algorithms or clients blocking Chinese IP ranges. There's certainly attacks they could try but I'm not convinced of the effectiveness. Miners need the outside world to pay their bills as exchange for RMB is impossible.
- nanzhong 8y ago
  Yes, you can put the orphaned transactions back in the mempool to be processed again. But what if the Bitcoins in those transactions are already spent on the "winning" fork? Does it now mean that the wait for a transaction to be considered "confirmed" needs to be longer the conventional six blocks and potentially arbitrarily long? China already banned non-state sanctioned VPNs in 2018. Anyone circumventing the Great Firewall via "obfuscated transports" could get into legal trouble by the Chinese authority. The Chinese government successfully suppressed all dissidents and millions of protesters in 1989. Underestimate its force at your own peril. The whole point of the article is that a centralized entity (the Chinese government) may be able to attack Bitcoin without controlling any mining power. A hard fork in response to actions of a centralized entity could shatter people's confidence in Bitcoin's promise of being decentralized. Blocking Chinese IP ranges in a 100% reliable way is going to very difficult. This defense is also rendered useless if someone does use a VPN to propagate the Chinese fork (perhaps intentionally by a centralized entity).

A2017U1 8y ago

You essentially point to a very large reorganisation and say all the tx's on the global chain will disappear once the GFW opens up again. All orphaned transactions go back in the mempool as unconfirmed and will be processed later. Simply blocking all global traffic already creates a huge monetary incentive for miners to sidestep the rules and it's easily achieved with obfuscated transports. Such an action would be noticeable and considered hostile. Were they causing network disruption you'd likely see a hardfork to memory hard algorithms or clients blocking Chinese IP ranges. There's certainly attacks they could try but I'm not convinced of the effectiveness. Miners need the outside world to pay their bills as exchange for RMB is impossible.

nanzhong 8y ago
Yes, you can put the orphaned transactions back in the mempool to be processed again. But what if the Bitcoins in those transactions are already spent on the "winning" fork? Does it now mean that the wait for a transaction to be considered "confirmed" needs to be longer the conventional six blocks and potentially arbitrarily long? China already banned non-state sanctioned VPNs in 2018. Anyone circumventing the Great Firewall via "obfuscated transports" could get into legal trouble by the Chinese authority. The Chinese government successfully suppressed all dissidents and millions of protesters in 1989. Underestimate its force at your own peril. The whole point of the article is that a centralized entity (the Chinese government) may be able to attack Bitcoin without controlling any mining power. A hard fork in response to actions of a centralized entity could shatter people's confidence in Bitcoin's promise of being decentralized. Blocking Chinese IP ranges in a 100% reliable way is going to very difficult. This defense is also rendered useless if someone does use a VPN to propagate the Chinese fork (perhaps intentionally by a centralized entity).