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Re:China orders Bitcoin exchanges in capital city to close by lordnacho on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @12:06PM (#15285857)
You gotta wonder if they will go after the miners. I suppose other cryptos have dealt with this issue, and one with the right properties will emerge, but BTC requires huge warehouses full of computers to mine, so the decentralisation part of the argument is a bit flawed.

And the big miners happen to be in China, which is pretty convenient for the government. Not sure exactly how much of capacity is in the country, but if a lot of it gets shut down I think there's a 2 week reset window before the difficulty can come back down. If it's a large proportion it will significantly lengthen the time between blocks.

Also in the bigger picture, if illicit movements bother the Chinese, will they pressure other countries to stop allowing BTC?

Re:China orders Bitcoin exchanges in capital city to close by solotronics on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @01:53PM (#15287001)
the core dev team for BTC already said they are prepared to either emergency adjust difficulty or change the hashing algo if a disaster happens with the miners .. yes this is technically a hard fork of the block chain but it has happened before in an emergency
Re:China orders Bitcoin exchanges in capital city to close by lawn on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @03:40PM (#15288107)
Well the core dev team already classifies the miners as attacking the network when they don't vote for them and chooses another fork. I would take what they say with a huge grain of salt.
Re:China orders Bitcoin exchanges in capital city to close by fwdslash on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @01:54PM (#15287009)
> but BTC requires huge warehouses full of computers to mine

Currently. It wasn't always that way, and there are many other currencies (Monero) where that isn't the case.