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> This article actually makes a good point, which I think many bitcoiners ignore, which is that governments have a big ability to seize hashrate and use it agai

> This article actually makes a good point, which I think many bitcoiners ignore, which is that governments have a big ability to seize hashrate and use it against the network. I have some criticism about the piece though. We been here before and governments have proven that they can't really seize anything online, for long. Look at thepiratebay, how long have people been trying to take that website down? It wasn't even decentralized before and they could still manage. How the fuck are they gonna manage to take down a decentralized network you can run from anywhere? Protocols can change as well. Make the protocol automatically ignore miners connected from government IPs, and there is a 100 more solutions to this problem. > China really controls 80% of the global hashrate No, "China" as a country doesn't "own" 80% of the global hashrate. Bypassing that you can never really know where a mining operation is located (proxies are really easy to setup today), a lot of mining operations are indeed based in China, but just because the organization is based in China doesn't mean that the entire mining pool is based in China.

fogof 6y ago
> look at thepiratebay, how long have people been trying to take that website down Taking down piratebay servers is fundamentally different from launching a 51% attack on Bitcoin. In the former, any mirror of the site that is left up can serve for everyone that wants to visit it. In a 51% attack on Bitcoin, any node running Bitcoin software would recognize the attack chain as valid, so everyone would have to make a coordinated effort to change their clients to fight back. > you can never really know where a mining operation is located (proxies are really easy to set up today) [1] here, by the way, is a project from cambridge that tracks IP addresses connecting to pools and says that 65% come from China. It's not clear to me why one would go to the trouble of setting up a proxy to mine bitcoin, especially when speed of connectivity might be the difference between your block getting included or failing to get included. And if all these miners are going through proxies, why set them up in China specifically, when many other countries don't have laws against bitcoin mining? [1] : https://cbeci.org/mining_map https://cbeci.org/mining_map

fogof 6y ago

> look at thepiratebay, how long have people been trying to take that website down Taking down piratebay servers is fundamentally different from launching a 51% attack on Bitcoin. In the former, any mirror of the site that is left up can serve for everyone that wants to visit it. In a 51% attack on Bitcoin, any node running Bitcoin software would recognize the attack chain as valid, so everyone would have to make a coordinated effort to change their clients to fight back. > you can never really know where a mining operation is located (proxies are really easy to set up today) [1] here, by the way, is a project from cambridge that tracks IP addresses connecting to pools and says that 65% come from China. It's not clear to me why one would go to the trouble of setting up a proxy to mine bitcoin, especially when speed of connectivity might be the difference between your block getting included or failing to get included. And if all these miners are going through proxies, why set them up in China specifically, when many other countries don't have laws against bitcoin mining? [1] : https://cbeci.org/mining_map https://cbeci.org/mining_map