Bitcoin Forum

A new academic paper has mentioned bitcoin as resistant to state control.It says the following reasons for it.Bitcoin is not minted in a physical place,it operates under encryption and places a numerical ceiling on the number that can be created.Just like internet,bitcoin is multijurisdictional and so one state cannot shut it down and mkiners and users can move anywhere they want.

Bitcoin is not bounded by any political boundary and jurisdiction even if 1 country banned it other countries will still use it. But even though bitcoin is resistant to state control it does not mean that the state cannot limit bitcoin operations. In an extreme condition of the state will unite and will declare to ban bitcoin all over the world then it is the end for bitcoin.

State control is not necessarily banning.  For instance, the Chinese gov could make a deal with chinese miners, that, against electricity subsidy, they exclude certain addresses or so, and orphan blocks containing these transactions.  If these miner pools have more than 51% hash power, that becomes an unspoken soft fork that will block these addresses.  For the moment, the Chinese government should make an agreement with 5 persons: the 5 biggest pools.

I don't think so. Even with 51% hashing power you wont be able to mine all blocks. So some blocks will be mined by non chinese miners and they will built on this blocks. invalidating 2 or more blocks thanks to the chinese will be bad for bitcoin and its price. People will simply go with another coin and i doubt that the miners will be happy about that, so they will not agree to blocking certain addresses.

Bitcoin is not mined in physical place?Really?
What do you think about all the mining hardware?You have to put the mining hardware somewhere in order to mine btc.Mining with PC isn`t profitable.
What if some government or all the governments ban the mining hardware,not bitcoin.
Would bitcoin survive without miners?

though people think mining is all done in china.
even the "chinese" pools are spread across different countries.

so if one pool finds out it has a 'take down' order. they just load the ASICS up on a truck and move to a different factory.
only affecting a couple percent of network hash at a time. (even antpools 16% is actually spread over SEVERAL locations) and so the impact of moving asics is marginal and not going to affect block creation.

the 10min is an average so maybe it turns into 12minutes.. no one notices because its an average and not an actual real world fixed 10min anyway.

then within 48 hours those asics that are moved are then running in a new country

i don't know if it's that easy. Some of the farms are quite big and it's not so easy to find a new space and relocate. Also if the miners are confiscated you still might have other but it would be a hard blow. Additionally the people in charge could be put in custody or what ever. Other than that i agree that it's not easy to bring all miners in china down.

Imagine how big is China and locating every one of those miner wont really be an easy job at all and it would takes time and as being mentioned they can easily relocate from place to another which would really be a very hard task for government. This assumption is possible but really hard to implement at all.

We talk about china, where you as the government can make something up and arrest the people in charge. But let us focus on the equipment. relocating does cost money and you also have a downtime. How long do you think they can operate at a profit while relocating all the time? If the government will find out about a mining farm they will raid it and not wait until it relocates.

Well, if they have made you an offer you can hardly refuse, you will orphan them, because if you don't, they can verify this.  With 75% of hash rate agreeing on the secret hard fork, the orphaning is not that big.  Chances for 1 bloc orphaning (normal) is 1/4.  Chances of 2 blocs orphaning: 1/16.  Chances of 3 blocs orphaning, 1/64.  Chances of 4 blocs orphaning, 1/256.  So, essentially every 1000 blocs, you will have 5 blocs or more orphaned this way.  Not a big deal, especially because most transactions will be taken over in the new chain prong.  So as a user, you wouldn't even notice if you're not concerned.  You had 5 confirmations on the chain ; boing, these are orphaned, by another prong where you ALSO had 5 confirmations.  You wouldn't notice. 

Just from looking at the conversations regarding a BU fork at 75% the orphan rate seems to be a big deal to many. You will have smaller orphaned blocks by the hour and only once a week a 5 block orphan, but if we look at 50% it is 1/32 = every 5 hours. I can not imagine this would be good for Bitcoin.People would notice and talk about and we would lose many users that are here for idealistic reasons.

Bitcoin is completely impervious to state control because governments don't give a shit about bitcoin. Trading bitcoin for fiat is when governments gain absolute control over Bitcoin just as they do when any other commodity is traded for fiat. They don't begin to care until their money becomes involved.

Similar thread : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1820098.0

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No, if there is a BU fork, there won't be any orphaning, because you then have two chains.  Non-BU miners will not mine upon BU blocks, and BU miners having majority will build more and more on the stronger BU chain, if they keep this majority.  You simply have two chains, with different miners (the BU miners on one chain, and the non-BU miners on the other one: two coins).

There is no more orphaning between Bitcoin-BU and Bitcoin-SW than there is orphaning between, say, namecoin and bitcoin.

yes but china is currently leading far ahead in bitcoin mining, right? With diff rising and rewards dropping, who's gonna step up to China?


and how long will it take for them to see and figure out a way to use the bitcoin to their advantage?

I think similar to this, bitcoin can not be shut down in a few moments or within a short period of time, the miners are all over the world and there are some other external things that can affect the popularity of bitcoin and it's stability but I can say that very indirectly the governments can do something to bitcoin except if they ban the bitcoin to be used in their countries.

Fiat must remain under government control. Economies are balanced using monetary controls which includes manipulating the money supply. That can't be done without control over the production of fiat. Bitcoin will never be any government's fiat.

They already have learned to use Bitcoin to their advantage. The USA parsed the block chain to help catch and prosecute Ross Ulbrich (DPR), Robert Faiella (BtcKing), Charlie Shrem and many of the users of Silk Road. They have learned to track btc addresses to identify people where their address is used in connection with their real identity. They have made a ton of money auctioning off confiscated BTC. I would think the US government loves bitcoin.

while bitcoin itself could continue to operate run by someone, somewhere as long as the internet still runs, the state could wield huge control over bitcoin's utility.

all they have to do is kill off all the exchanges, prosecute the publicly known developers and companies and suddenly alot less people will decide it's worth anything to them.

you can't kill bitcoin. you can probably as good as kill the demand and utility.

As soon as they let some companies run with Bitcoin accepted as a payment method, it's not going to happen too soon. They can't back it off now, it's too late. What they can do is just keep throwing rocks at Bitcoin through the mainstream media so people will get afraid of investing in it, and investors will leave. China successfully did that in the past months. But even without exchanges Bitcoin trading is still gonna happen. You can find people in your area that want to sell or buy Bitcoin pretty easy.

But what else does it take to bring financial freedom if not the list of reasons you just put up there? Bitcoin was made to get us out of governmental control and grant us global decentralized economy and I think a deviation from juetbon cor principle will render Bitcoin futile and do it was indeed made to resist state control.

In the case of the Bitcoin ETF, the government itself said that Bitcoin can not be regulated, so I think it is really difficult for them to exert any influence on this.

they can combine throwing rock with stuff like the bitlicence. that suppresses bitcoin while simultaneously looking like they really, really care. how many options does someone have in new york state?

all they have to do is amp up the requirements for legit companies until they give up and it doesn't even look oppressive then.

This is definitely incorrect.

51% majority controls ALL the blocks if they want to.  They can
re-org the blockchain any time they want and undo any recent blocks
they want.

Of course and that's what we need Bitcoin to be and not a currency being controlled by governments and their failing policies. To me Bitcoin should stay this way and be resistant against any form of centralization.

Bitcoin is not resistant to state control. In the past china tried to hold the control of bitcoin, but it didn't come to reality . I believe few of the corporates that function along with bitcoin holds the control.

It is the exactly things that all of us want, most of us love bitcoin because it is free from any control and no government or state or country that able to control bitcoin and we like it that way, that is why I believe that bitcoin can become big things in the future because there are no limit in bitcoin

If nothing else, I hope the controversy with bitcoin opens peoples eyes to how far people will go to control things like governments, banks, economies and financial systems.

It might be important for things like banks and governments to be decentralized to make them resistant to control.

The same way one might say bitcoin being decentralized, makes it more difficult to manipulate by those with hidden agendas.

There are no boundaries to the extent of control of bitcoins.
Bitcoin is the currency of the Internet,
a distributed, worldwide, decentralized digital money. Unlike traditional currencies such as dollars,
bitcoins are issued and managed,
without any central authority whatsoever,
there is no government, company, or bank in charge of Bitcoin.
Thus clearly bitcoins are resistant to state control.

Now I'm not so sure that bitcoin is resistant to state control. If some government decide to take control over bitcoin they may spend lots of funds on hashing power and take over bitcoin.

No, what they meant to say was that the exchanges was not regulated and that some of them < Chinese exchanges > might manipulate certain things to influence the price. < Example : Faking trades & volume of transactions > You know, the stuff that they used to do, before the Chinese government stepped in.

The SEC just made sure that the rich people of this world is protected, because money is power and they do not want to lose the power to some communist country. ^hmf^

+1. This. Thank you @Hydrogen. There will be many campaigns of paid hacks who'd try to develop fear and saying we 'must change Bitcoin because it is broken/flawed' - Bitcoin is working beautifully beyond most our dreams and has become the ultimate source for store of value/investment for all of us to have financial freedom because it is decentralized, permissionless, and has a 1mb blocksize limit (which fights consolidation/centralization) so when mining operations get shut down, me or you can get our computers running to continue mining.

Keep up the integrity of the Bitcoin network for the years to come.

Well obviously because Bitcoin itself is against States control. This is another reason why it is seen as such a good hedge against Fiat currencies.

When you look at the future in my opinion they will only be space for decentralised currencies to live people will realise over time that the government is scamming the Life Savings out of them and once they realise that everyone will move to Bitcoin.

You are wrong and since you mention the recent blocks i think you understand why.
You need to have a valid blockchain. So if you want to change the 3rd most recent block, then you can not simply change this block. You will need to change the blocks build upon this block as well. Since they need to be valid you will have to mine them. The difficulty will remain the same but it will take you longer then the average 10 min. In the same time the original chain will be adding to its height. Therefore you can not chain it at any time. You can do it if you outperform the original chain, which will happen but also cause many orphaned blocks. People will not like that.

It's good that we are not controlled by the state, that way we will last longer and we will have the freedom to comply with the governmental rules and regulations. This reality would not also help us to achieve a massive adoption because without the support of the government an average joe type of people will not give their confidence over bitcoin and from time to time we will see manipulation which we have to play on.

That one aspect of bitcoin we can always count on. It is decentralized so no central government can ever control it. That is why etf was denied, they cannot control bitcoin.

Bitcoin is not in the scope of any government jurisdiction and cannot be controlled by these corrupt politicians that's why people loves it because of its decentralized feature.
Bitcoin has no rules or regulations but this doesn't mean that a country cannot ban or limit bitcoin currency in their nation they can still do that if they feel like this digital currency is being an hindrance to their fiat currency.