When you say "China" do you mean like an actor that can make coordinated decisions? Or just a geographic region? I'm asking out of curiosity because yeah there's a lot of miners in China across many geographic regions but I never saw any evidence that they even talking to each other, even less coordinated enough to agree on making a decision as drastic at attacking the Bitcoin blockchain.
Neither mining pools (who practically have the actual power over transaction inclusion an ordering) nor the miners are cooperating. I'm also certain the CCP wouldn't be practically able to locate and control all of them that easily.
The gun in the head strategy works best when you're only asking your populace to do simple things. For complex, technical tasks, the usual response is "Oops, I can't concentrate while you've got a gun against my head", and then you can shoot them but that's not going to help your task get accomplished any quicker. (This is also why working conditions at say Google or Apple tend to be pretty good, and why Soviet scientists were treated relatively well even if the rest of the population wasn't.)
GP is ipso facto calling out lazy casual racism, but framed constructively because they’re better at it than me.
The Chinese government has 100% power to do whatever they want. If they want to kill you on an invented charge and send the bill for the bullets to your parents, they can do so (and have done so).
Yes Western governments can use force to intervene with private companies and have done so in the past, but it's unusual for them to do that because people and companies have rights and they can contest the action in court. That's nothing compared to what China can do with no recourse, see Alibaba or the Canadian Michael's for a recent example.
You cannot pretend that the two are similar situations, and doing so is whataboutism. It has nothing to do with race and everything to do with the difference between a free country and a totalitarian country.
Having a go at authoritarian demagoguery and secret police is one thing, have at it.
But doubling down on the casual false equivalence between a people, a country, a government, and a person, just reinforces the point.
Oh, and when you find a free country, do let me know. I haven’t seen one yet. So far, from Australia to Zimbabwe, all governments coerce and murder their citizens.
See also:
Using "China" but assuming .hk and .mo are included
Using "China" but assuming .hk and .mo are excluded
Using "China" to mean the area administered by the ROC
Using "China" to mean the area administered by the PRC
Using "China" to mean the area claimed by the ROC
Using "China" to mean the area claimed by the PRC
Using "China" to mean any area historically associated with the rule or influence of the Xia, Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han, Xin, Wei, Shu, Wu, Jin (1st/2nd), Sui, Tang, Wu Zhou, Liao, Song, Yuan, Ming, or Qing dynasties and their associated interregna and feudal periods.
Using "Chinese government" to mean the CCP, but not the State Council, the NPC, or the PLA
Using "Chinese government" to mean the CCP, the State Council, the NPC, and the PLA
Using "Chinese government" to mean Xi Jinping.
Using "Chinese government" to mean the KMT or DPP.
Using "Chinese government" to mean any and all the above, except the KMT, DPP, or PFP.
Using "mainland China" to try to be more specific (it still isn't, and now you've started a war)
Using "Greater China" to name your regional offices. Looking at you, Apple. (no such thing, it's a western fabrication, like General Zuo's chicken)
Referring to the Chinese language (which one?)
Referring to Chinese characters (hanzi? kanji? jiantizi? hanja??)
Referring to "Chinese food" (this is like categorizing haggis with paella)
Referring to "Chinese people" as though it's one ethnic group
Calling anyone who you think looks Chinese, Chinese.
On the other hand, calling racism "nonsense", in any context, that's some Oswald Mosley shit.
In this context IMHO the choice of words matters quite a bit. I do my best to never write “China” if I’m in fact referring to the entity commonly identified as “CCP”.
(I understood OP’s point though, probably because I used to make the same mistake—perhaps still inadvertently do with some other countries.)
(ok this is the stuff of conspiracy theories but it's still a possibility, isn't it?)
It seems to me if Bitcoin got to be of huge strategic importance to global finance, countries like the US would start to build out that power. The idea that the economy of say the US was at the mercy of other foreign governments would probably not sit well.
This applies to all large powers just using the US as an example.
In any case, you can follow it like this:
* Nations desire to control strategic resources
* Bitcoin is one such strategic resource
* To control Bitcoin, you need more than 50% of the network
* China has 65% of the network
* China can control Bitcoin
However, if Xi Jinping decided to crush Bitcoin for whatever reason large scale mining in China, which is well past 50%, would quickly do what he wanted. As such he has de facto control over Bitcoin, though I personally doubt it’s something he would do.
the idea that every miner in china will jump when xi says is pure fantasy.
yall act like china is populated entirely by robots. it's a complex society just like anywhere else.
It's just as farfetched and unlikely, but anti-Bitcoiners just keep theorizing about a hostile China takeover crashing BTC price as if it's feasible, without considering the inverse.
It's not bluffing if you're willing to do it. But it's a lot cheaper if you don't have to follow through.
China is scary because of the big risks they're willing to take. Like giant earthquakes or drowning Shanghai if their hydro power system has the failure that western civil engineers have predicted.
Thanks for calling out this mental bias.
Even before Bitcoin, we had plenty of other alternative currencies that could have replaced the dollar. I’ve been reading headlines speculating about the dollar being replaced by other currencies as long as I can remember, before Bitcoin existed.
To your point: If Bitcoin somehow did become an alternative world currency and USD was out of the running, wouldn’t that create great incentive for China to crash Bitcoin prices and drive everyone to use their national currency?
I’m not happy with the current rate of inflation, but I think it’s also clear that true hyperinflationary scenarios aren’t likely in modern countries. As much as we like to criticize governments (often rightfully so), it takes orders of magnitude more incompetence and malice for a government to enter hyperinflation. It’s not something that is stumbled upon by accident.
Given the explosion of debt to GDP in the west vs the east, I see no way the Renmimbi will not continue to appreciate against the dollar, and I fully expect Chinese monetary dominance to increase with the government's continued annexation of Hong Kong.
BTC will probably dominate in countries were currency value is routinely destroyed (developing nations, Russia, the US and Europe to some extent) but as only as a back channel currency: I doubt any major commodity market or trade is ever going to be priced in BTC.
The idea that the US can use its military to reassert financial dominance in the modern age is silly especially after having exported near all manufacturing capacity to China.
US aircraft carriers are worthless in the pacific. They haven't accomplished anything significant in the South China Sea. Hell, even more aggressive annexations like that of Crimea were never blocked.
Modern warefare is no longer physicial. It's economic and online. If anything the information economy in the US and the West are more at risk from espionage, information manipulation and other attacks given the value of the intellectual assets are far greater and that China has a vice grip on communications. Additionally, our supply chain is incredibly dependent on the East. As local demand picks up and the region can afford to be less dependent on the US, they can afford to cut off supply chains with mild consequences compared to what the US would face.
Good luck with your guns.
I’m not a fan of the current inflation in the US, but the idea that the US currency is being destroyed has been blown out of proportion online. People like to quote M1 money supply as if it’s the only measure of wealth, while ignoring that investors weren’t keeping investments in cash in the first place. Inflation drives up the value of assets, by definition.
It would, but there's no guarantee that if people left Bitcoin they would end up in RMB. More likely they'd jump to another cryptocurrency, or to Euros. People tend to distrust the last party that fucked them over.
I could see a dangerous situation if China let Bitcoin thrive for a generation, let all the other currencies wither on the vine through normal market mechanisms, and then decided to exercise their national control over Bitcoin. That's basically the Amazon strategy - make your product so appealing that all the other retailers go bankrupt, and then jack up prices once there's no alternative and a whole generation assumes you're the normal way to buy things. (Come to think of it, that's kinda the U.S. dollar strategy now.) But that's a generation off, so naturally I'm not thinking of it, and I doubt very many others outside of HN are either.
In any case, crypto trading since 2017 has been nothing but people buying and selling imaginary ticker symbols on unregulated exchanges.
For example, XVG and ETC has been subject to successful 51% attacks more than once and every time the price was hardly affected. And each time the "solution" to deep chain reorg involved the exchanges freezing all trading while developers rushed to add a hardcoded checkpoint. Once the "correct" version of history has been manually restored, everybody sing kumbaya and goes back to paying real cash for monopoly money.
Crypto need no proof of anything (PoS is still vaporware - debate me if you want), other than a shared delusion of value headed by the bucket shops.
Tezos has a fully working Proof of stake system, and there are others. Feel free to share whatever you're on about, but I have a feeling "the debate" will be an exercise in goalpost moving.
The dollar is the value used to denominate world debt via the IMF. It's also (partially related to this fact) the "mattress currency" of a lot of nations... Nations hoard US dollars to back-stop their own economies, since if their currency starts to tank, they can use dollars to pay their international debts.
A worthless US dollar would have wide-ranging international currency disruption.
(which has some similarity to the original libra proposal from FB)
Try using projects that aren't "shitcoins" as an example
You can trade regulated BTC futures. (Regulation by itself isn't much of a feature. But it can be a good indicator to see how well something is integrated into mainstream finance.)
> [...] other than a shared delusion of value headed by the bucket shops.
You shouldn't dismiss the original bucket shops like that.
Why is that? Aren't Cardano and Polkadot PoS as they claim or doesn't it work?
I can't speak for every PoS coin out there but Cardano/Ouroborous explicitly assumes partial synchrony which is arguably never a good idea for a supposedly permissionless blockchain.
How does "there's a theoretical issue, and also it shares a problem with PoW" follow from "PoS is vaporware"?
This is far from a solved problem, and this is the reason why PoS coins exist mostly on the fringe and ETH is taking very slow baby steps towards a ETH2. Nobody is certain that PoS will stand the test of time and my prediction is that it never will.
One might argue that they don't have to worry about anything judging from how well exchanges has been able to coordinate with the developers to pick a side whenever a major fork is spotted. But then it calls into the question whether we actually need a blockchain when a couple of interested party are the ones who gets to decide which fork is valid.
Not exactly. The point of "nothing as stake" attack is that you can pull off the attack while having... "nothing a stake".
Citation needed on this one I'm afraid. If nothing else, a currency that the Party cannot control would be A Problem. China did not have much economic benefit in halting the ANT IPO, yet it did not go through all the same. There _might_ be a benefit in allowing bitcoin to continue to exist of course, if they think it advances their cause more than it hurts it. But as soon as that calculus changes, it seems quite likely that the big mining corps (with as you say at the moment of speaking about 65% of total hash rate) will receive some "friendly invitations" (from unfriendly people with guns) to stop their business operations.
Regardless, the attacks described here require large concentrations of mining power. In theory, the best way to attack it would be to wait for (or even encourage/subsidize) your country to become the geographical leader in mining operations.
Or even better: Wait for companies in competing countries to start holding BTC on their balance sheets and consumers to put their investments in BTC. Now you have a kill switch for part of the balance sheets of competing countries.
I personally doubt this is happening, but I’m sure it’s being considered as an attack scenario.
2. Traceable currency.
3. Soft power / control of narrative? Bitcoin seems to symbolize people's loss of faith in fiat system, and their governments.
Cryptocurrencies aren't very anonymous.
Right now they don't, no. But to my mind Bitcoin being subject to the whims of a major world power is a big knock against it, given that it aims to be a currency alternative. I don't want such an alternative to subject to any kind of geopolitical mood.
It's not inconceivable (to me at least) that leaders could decide it's personally beneficial to them (or politically beneficial) to damage Bitcoin, even if it cost a ton of their tax payers money.
Maybe the US government doesn't mind that? Maybe they hope it will die, and send everyone flocking back to the dollar?
Even if you do control 51%, it would be a big long term capital and operational expense to do so, so you'd probably want to play nice rather than destroy what you've built.
Besides, even if you attack it, a new network will just spring up again, possibly with a different mining algorithm, making your old mining gear obsolete.
Also, in PoS, another last resort "nuclear option" defence strategy would be to slash the nodes that attack the network through a hard fork. It's a "nuclear option" because in theory it's unlikely to happen, only used a deterrent.
"Slash" here means to confiscate and burn their staking deposit on the new network. (The old one will continue to operate where the arrackers reside, thus a "fork")
I think there's a conflict of interest issue here that would prevent such a move even if it would be worth it - the miners clearly have an incentive to keep the current PoW mechanism, as without it they're left holding a bunch of expensive useless tech. And without the miners willing to go along with a move from PoW to PoS, at best you're going to get a split between the PoW and PoS chains rather than a clean shift from one to the other and just create a mess, which isn't ideal for anyone.
All that matters is the market's valuation of the currency: it would be irrational for miners to do anything except expand until their costs nearly match the reward.
I think the answer to what you actually said is; miners don't control consensus on the network - it's not up to them, it's up to fullnodes/users who can change the ruleset whenever they want.
And I agree to a point, but miners are the ones that effectively run the network, and there aren't actually all that "many" of them. Without the existing miners willing to contribute the existing network would fall apart. PoS is an interesting situation because it technically makes the miners unnecessary, but obviously the miners are going to say "no" and just keep going with the existing Bitcoin. It would just create another Bitcoin Cash situation effectively, which is a lot less appealing than if everybody switched to PoS and left nobody using the old version.
The reason you haven't seen this in the global cryptocurrency industry is because of network effects and adoption curves. Most programmers would probably agree that C++ is archaic and that the software industry has moved on to newer languages like Rust, Go, Kotlin, ES6, etc. Why then do Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google, etc. all rely on large quantities of C++ code? Because they were founded in the last millennia, when C++ was basically the only alternative for what they were trying to do, and have deeply enmeshed ecosystems and value chains that are all dependent on their existing C++ codebase. Throw it out and you throw out the $5T+ in value they've built. They couldn't have built that up without the 20 year head start they have, but if you're founding a tech company now, you're pretty dumb to use C++.
Similarly, Bitcoin has built a whole ecosystem of miners, speculators, traders, exchanges, payment systems, wallets, etc. Throw proof-of-work out and you throw all that out, and along with it your advantage over Ethereum, Cardano, Stellar, etc.
All us unreal engine using indie developers must be pretty dumb then. It’s true that programming in c# in unity is easier, but the end result of the c++ is a prettier game with more things happening at once at a higher frame rate. More grass, more characters, more animations, more AI nuance, more physics interactions, lower system requirements during a gpu shortage, etc
You're assuming that PoW is better than PoS.
Controlling the hash is similar to controlling a central bank - you've got the power to trash your currency, but that's coupled with you probably having the most to lose if you do so.
You could maybe do something stupid short-term - Say you own a controlling amount of hash, but a fraction of the currency. You could seize the currency, but by doing do you devalue it all. Who in their right mind would buy a seized bitcoin from you for any price, knowing you could seize it right back?
Currency equivalent would be the Fed suddenly stating a dollar was worth half-as-much as it was before (compared to some external thing) and compensating all US citizens by doubling their dollar earnings. As a dollar earner/spender you'd notionally be unaffected.
Dollar debt the US owed would be halved - Yay!
However the effect on non-US dollar holders would be cataclysmic - "You made half my money vanish, you might do it again, I don't want to ever hold US dollars again" and bricks of your currency is being used by children worldwide to build forts.
The entire selling point of BTC is that it's outside of conventional government control. If proved otherwise, it's without value.
More realistically, "Chinese Miners" aren't the government. They're miners, who happen to be in China, due to cheap power costs. At the first whiff of any meddling, their ASICs going to be on a plane and plugged into the Hoover Damn or Iceland's geothermals.
I think that's largely the point, other comments are appealing that somehow the Chinese govt has a lot to lose by seizing control of bitcoin, but in reality they probably just have no reason to yet, it beggars belief that an authoritarian government would allow private citizens to control an important currency on their own soil. My own take is that they are letting it run because of the shadow of doubt it is casting on the USD.
> ASICs going to be on a plane and plugged into the Hoover Damn or Iceland's geothermals
A little simplistic to think non-negligible percentages of the hash pool would turn themselves off, relocate internationally, completely disrupt the difficulty rate, put themselves at a massive disadvantage and subject themselves to an unknown foreign government who might be completely hostile toward them. More pertinently the CCP might "meddle" with their ability to fly out of the country as they have done with countless dissidents already.
If country X had cheaper power than china, than the majority of mining would be in country X.
If any human party has the power to defraud, manipulate, or commit any other nefarious act (as you imply China does), the system is vulnerable.
This is why proof of work provides some level of resilience—you have to be nefarious AND have access to massive compute resources to do harm. China has the compute resources, but not the incentive. A proof of stake power broker may have the incentive and not need the compute.
51% attacks don't double-spend coins. It just means you get to control which blocks are accepted, it doesn't mean you can violate the rules.
Basically btc might get too big to fail... then they may have international laws in place?
Some people just want to watch the world burn. - Alfred from The Dark Knight
That's making a lot of assumptions which I don't think there are good grounds to assume. For instance, that Bitcoin tax revenue is something the Chinese government cares enough about for it to affect its decision-making, or that Bitcoin is a "thorn in the side of dollar hegemony."
I think the reality is that Bitcoin (and cryptocurrency in general) is a niche thing that isn't nearly as important as its fans like to think it is, so there's little for a state-actor to gain by making the effort to disrupt it.
The CCP doesn't allow Chinese citizens to own Bitcoin as far as I know - however they allow mining because it's generating revenue.
And of course, Bitcoin's continued existence by the "army of HODLers" is a non-brainer when you join an MLM - everyone who has adopted it will push for its price to go up (or return to the prior buy price) so they can realize a profit - until the latest adopters are left holding the bag.
CO2 emissions is probably why I'd do it if I were the Chinese government frankly.
As things are now, people from authoritarian countries are really, really good at the former.
https://news.bitcoin.com/65-of-global-bitcoin-hashrate-conce...
That's not correct. Most pools are in China, but the majority of the hash rate is generated in the USA.
I'm curious why you are bullish on those 2 specifically?
Lol.
kek
Note that China already controls ~65% of Bitcoin hash rate, so if they wanted to execute this right now, they probably could.
That they haven't is one reason I'm bullish on cryptocurrency, and specifically Ethereum and Stellar, and it's entirely separate from why many other Bitcoin bulls are bullish on cryptocurrency. You don't need proof-of-work to secure a blockchain. You only need game theory: as long as each participant has more to gain from allowing Bitcoin's continued existence than destroying it (and they can't subvert or destroy it in a way that will be invisible to other market participants), it will continue to exist. China gains no benefit from destroying Bitcoin; they can just continue to let it exist and tax all the Bitcoin miners in China, generating revenue for themselves and their citizens and continuing to be a thorn in the side of dollar hegemony.
This also implies that proof-of-stake (if done right) is just as good as proof-of-work, which'll solve the energy issues associated with Bitcoin. And it means that cryptocurrency adoption, if it happens, isn't going to be because it's particularly good: rather, it'll be because the U.S. has destroyed the dollar. There's value in cryptocurrency simply in it being an alternative that's readily available, so that civilization doesn't stop if the U.S. does end up miscalculating and hyperinflating the dollar.