> 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

> 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