Bitcoin Forum

https://www.forbes.com/sites/billybambrough/2018/10/16/chinas-bitcoin-dominance-is-worrying-trumps-white-house-and-pushing-it-toward-ripple/
Based on the link above:
"China is, by some distance, the undisputed world leader in bitcoin mining — with Chinese mining pools controlling more than 70% of the bitcoin network's collective hash rate (a higher hash rate is better when mining cryptocurrencies as it increases your chance of finding the next block on the chain and receiving the bitcoin reward).
Many in the bitcoin and cryptocurrency industry have expressed concern about how much control this gives China over bitcoin, with the Beijing-based Bitmain Technologies mining more than half the world’s bitcoins.
Now it appears U.S. president Donald Trump's White House is also worrying about China's bitcoin dominance, with a Ripple Labs executive suggesting the U.S. administration is interested in ripple (XRP) adoption to offset China's bitcoin strength."

China manufactures most of the world’s bitcoin and cryptocurrency mining equipment and its massive mining farms are supported by the country's cheap electricity prices. Will the US be able to reach China's dominance?

Governments' fighting for control of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology would help improve adoption and promote the innovation.
But I fear it would have a negative effect on decentralization.
And we could have an indirect central system which would control the market.

I wonder how the White House and Mnuchin feel about this.

https://openbazaar.com/store/home/QmQ88EKXkMJxfmtyFboNCz4gmKAAwRVL8woCqZmpmRn878

It's not a complicated problem.  If the average person wants to rebalance the distribution of mining power, sink some money into mining equipment, start hashing and contribute to a pool in your own locale.  If China have achieved dominance, it's because they're willing to invest their time, money and effort into mining.  The cheap electricity also comes in handy, obviously.  But if you've got no skin in the game, it's not your call.  Either match the time, money and effort that others are putting in, or quit your bitching.

If Trump's White House think Ripple is a better alternative, then they're even more braindead than I thought.  Please put all your eggs in that basket, idiots.  Please.  It would prove beyond all doubt that Ripple is centralised (in case that wasn't already crystal clear).

I think these concerns are superfluous!
Although China's BTC mining is more, they will sell the excavated BTC, and most of the BTC is not in China!
Many BTCs are in the hands of some mysterious buyers!

China is one of the stricter countries in the watch for crypto-economic products and prohibits trading of bitcoins and other crypto-currencies. The country may not recognize bitcoin as a legal tender, but it does seem to have a clear view of an alternative issued by the state. Last year a plan would have been boasted of the potential of a state digital currency.

This year it was believed that crypto-currencies could not be considered a legitimate method of payments. Despite this, it was never a hard line against them created.

Indeed, the search for new talent to work in the new technology internally in the development of digital currencies is an indication that the country has been struggling to develop its own crypto-currency. The empty spots announced are for the area of ​​Computer Science, Cryptotomes and Microelectronics, the latter is focused on the integration of electronic circuits, according to the job description.

But is "this", the new Space run?

What's wrong with Ripple? I am not really familiar with them.

The biggest problem with the coin is how heavily pre-mined it is. It's a huge problem that most people don't want to talk about, especially Ripple's key holders.

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ripple/

If they are really worried about this, they would have introduced some subsidy scheme to help fund Bitcoin mining farms on

a large scale or even give tax incentives for them. Nope, I doubt if they are really worried about this at all and this will just

be another excuse not to invest in Bitcoin.  ::)  China is always one step ahead of their competition, because they are very

clever businessmen.  :P

I've recently read an article about the research of how China has the power to destroy Bitcoin. This research has done by academics from Princeton and Florida International Universities. Although this paper has not officially peer reviewed yet, it included some interesting aspects.

1) "Over 80 percent of Bitcoin mining is performed by six mining pools, with five of those managed directly by individuals or companies based in China"

2) "The primary threat to Bitcoin’s infrastructure is the '51-percent attack,' which consists of mining pools teaming up to control a majority of the hash rate (Bitcoin’s overall processing power), allowing them to directly influence much of what happens on the Bitcoin network." --> Chinese mining pools dominates 74 percent of Bitcoin’s hash power

https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/10/08/china-means-intent-destroy-bitcoin/

With those capabilities, China would be in a much more dominant position, and it's realistically hard to reach for the US.

If the Grabblers in the government really wanted to fix things they would have never applied the "Money Transfer Business" laws on people doing digital currency exchanges. That did a lot to hurt usage and innovation with digital currencies.

Worrying is one thing, taking action is another. If the White House is really worried on China's dominance in bitcoin, perhaps they would introduce some sort of programs or subsidy for mining farms in the US? But no, Trump's administration is busy on doing some silly things on Space Force, tariff wars and the likes.  It's easy to give a go signal on chip manufacturers to start doing their business in the US if they also want to compete on that space of the economy against China.

Crypto is not the strongest industry at present and Americans are not paying too much attention to it. If Crypto really has the potential, Americans will be the pioneers in the field of blockchain technology development, trust me. Because Americans are always the people who have the conditions to develop such technologies. Their country can help pioneers easily get rich.

It is really a hot problem because both china and US has a huge effect on the bitcoin market.

That's a topic for another section of the boards, really.  You can read this blog by BitMex (https://blog.bitmex.com/the-ripple-story/) to understand the difference between XRP and real cryptocurrencies.

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I'd have expected academics to be smarter.  This ridiculous theory only holds true if the individuals contributing to these pools had no free will.  China are not the equivalent of "the Borg" from Star Trek.  Each person is fully capable of thinking for themselves and directing their hashpower accordingly.

Worse still is when people who claim that China are a threat to decentralisation decide the best course of action is to resort to a centralised solution to neutralise that supposed threat.  But in reality, it is they who are the bigger threat to decentralisation.  There are some people (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;threads;u=820936;sa=showPosts) (who I would call utter fuckwits) on this forum who genuinely believe that because they are personally uncomfortable with China's level of contribution to the hashrate, that we should change Bitcoin in an attempt to prevent the use of ASICs or pools and to change Bitcoin's proof-of-work mechanism to something totally experimental and untested.  I'd have thought it went without saying that Bitcoin is not centrally planned in that way, so no one should be in a position to determine what percentage of Chinese hashpower is "acceptable".  These things are meant to be permissionless.  Contribute as much or as little hashpower to the network as you desire, but don't try to restrict others from doing the same.

If we set the precedent that someone gets to decide when any particular region is contributing "too much" to the hashrate, something has gone badly wrong and freedom is under threat.  It's also just a touch sanctimonious to be making arguments about China's totalitarianism if the person saying that would be resorting to the same tactic to fight them.  

I hope that this is still the case but nowadays I don't think it still is.

Everything makes worry to United States about  the China. %35 of the world trades is in hand of China, and ofcourse they have the bitcoin and the cryptocurrency dominance. If you see their improvement in every business USA has rights to worry ofcourse. I have just checked that the bitcoin mining percentes of the world, China comes up with %75! It is huge number i believe..

You can read the article here: https://cryptona.co/china-largest-bitcoin-mining-capacity-75-percent-world/

that is not the biggest problem, the biggest problem is the centralization of this coin and the full control that the Ripple labs has over everything that is happening in that cryptocurrency from the development to transactions and keys.
and this articles seems more like an advertisement for XRP rather than being a legit argument specially since it is using mostly false or exaggerated statements about bitcoin.

China is trying to step back from Bitcoin. I think China does not prevent anyone from increasing its influence on Bitcoin. I do not blame China for the fact that there Bitcoin was so popular. If it were not a ban on cryptocurrency in China, I think the market would grow more actively.

Both china and the United States has strict regulations on bitcoin circulation. China is probably the more stringent.
A battle for mining dominance would only increase the centralization of bitcoin.
It's of course just reputed.

Well, the short answer is that Ripple is considered centralized. About 70% of Ripple is under control of the company, which is way above accepted standards on the crypto market. They are slowly releasing some of it, but it's still a long way to go. Another thing is that since Ripple is mainly used for collaborations with banks, there is an option to freeze the money on accounts (on gateways) when there is suspicious activity, which is again too much power.
China is playing a weird and dangerous game which can lead it to failure instead of potential economic growth. While being de facto the most serious country in mining business, it banned ICOs and cryptocurrency exchanges. The atmosphere is hostile, though I believe that mining is not against the law yet. I read that this policy leads to shift to other countries like Canada and USA. I think a smarter move would be to welcome and encourage companies like Bitmain to operate there more, than adopt highly centralized Ripple, that can allow Ripple's company to dictate its rules on the market to everyone, including USA.

What if China just wants to control BTC because they were smart . US had opportunity and missed the boat.

If America is so concerned about leadership then let them take and buy bitcoins. China is progressing and they are the best miners !

US and China are always butting heads. They’re even competing on who will win the Artificial Technology race. It seems they’re trying to outdo each other in all aspects. I’m not sure how the competition will affect the crypto market though. But the divide between the two countries will of course have political and social implications. Either we’ll have more competing cryptos, or one will be able to create that better coin that will win the world. What do you think?

It is true, Bitcoin is currently mainly produced in China. It harms to real decentralization. Probably, decentralized coins should be more like Dash with the masternode system.