Bitcoin Forum

Isnt a problem if China has 68% of the hashrate?

Couldnt China do a 51% percent attack?

China doesn't have 68% of hashrate, but 68% of hashrate comes from chinese pools. That's different.
and yes, it is certainly a problem.. this could be more decentralized, but that's not that bad.

No. Chinese government does not control the pools. Pools are not that coordinated and if there war a slightly chance that this could happen, miners would just move to another pools.

Take a look at this graph from blockchain.com

https://i.imgur.com/ngsttzF.png
source:https://www.blockchain.com/charts/pools

There are many different individuals who controls those pools. They are not the same people, and they do not own the hash power: miners can move to other pools at any time.

I will point you to an old thread, Is CHINA CONTROLLING Bitcoin? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1465778.0).

Are you talking about China, their government performing a 51% attack? Or some mining pools?
You just have to understand the money and resources involved pulling it off and what incentives the bad actors doing a 51% attack, it's not worth a try.

If you are suggesting a mega-thread, please summarize that thread first and include it in your suggestion post.

It's not worth it for now, but what if it happens in the future where bitcoin cant be mined anymore or when the bitcoin block reward is already too small and makes the bitcoin network difficulty becomes so low?

you shouldn't worry too much about what may or may not happen a 140 years from now since that is one and a half generation away from today! not to mention that with the way bitcoin is going, so far despite the huge decrease in the amount of block reward (from 50 down to 6.25) both hashrate and difficulty have grown to ridiculously higher values while miners are making millions of percentages more money compared to when the reward was 50!

Since Chinese President Xi Jinping has publicly supported the blockchain, it can be expected that China’s share will become even bigger. It will be one of the ways to control technology in the absence of competitors from the United States.

China as a country doesn't have any share of bitcoin's mining to increase or decrease in the future. it is only individuals and companies that are mostly outside of China and many are even in US and are connecting to a Chinese pool the server of which is both inside and outside China.
as for the government "support" they have never supported bitcoin or even the blockchain technology. they have only hyped up their future plans about releasing the "new" version of their national fiat which will probably be called Digital Yuan.

It does unless they're operating illegally.  I suppose in this case, it gives the CCP a good reason to just 'requisition' the pool.

China has had over 50% of hashing power from about one or two years after the introduction of ASICs.

This is solely happening because of the increase of bitcoin price right?
And what you stated is the increase from the past to the present but it still won't change the profitability of mining bitcoin and the fact that some miners have stopped mining because they can't get decent profit anymore.

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Anyway, it's just a curiosity, and getting a satisfying answer will definitely stop me from asking the same question again. I won't make it until 140 years later for sure.

Difficulty will decrease if people quit mining.  This will then make it more profitable for those that are still mining, or start back up.  At least until the next difficulty change ...

Energy costs less now.

ed: Ah, I should have said electricity.  Too much crowing about my VDE and the 10% dividend yield @ $33 purchase price.  Anyway, since difficulty adjustment is in 20 hours it is probable that difficulty won't fall as much as it should as this will be some 50-50 split of 12.5 and 6.25 blocks ... then what?  Slower blocks, with transaction fees going up quite a bit, which in theory should compensate for some of this loss.

This may well be Triggering, causing ppl to rage sell their bitcoin & drop the price. That could drop off more miners, making the blocks even slower, and increasing fees even more. Ponder it under the tree of woe, just as I have pondered the delay of the release of the New New Warriors, featuring Trailblazer, Safespace, Snowflake, some emo vampire sir, and Screentime (poor fella was exposed to way too much experimental internet gas as a kid).

well based on what i have seen so far mining and how profitability and hashrate change over time is way more complicated than that. we can't really say this reason and that reason caused a rise or fall. there are many reasons involved.
of course price is the easiest to see and measure. but other reasons include the advancement of the mining equipment. for example during the 50BTC reward time people were mostly mining with their CPUs and with the mining algorithms (SHA256) that might have not been that optimized. then it was GPUs then ... and finally we are at ASICs which improve every now and then. and "improvement" means miner spends less while producing more computing power and earns more money.
another influencing factor could be fees. although most of the times it is a small factor. for instance during 2017 miners were earning up to 5BTC on top of 12.5 block reward in fees per block. that was around $30k to $40k additional income.

'Blockchain' will allow them to squeeze their population harder than ever. That's what truly interests them about the technology.

China's leadership doesn't give the slightest shit about Bitcoin. They've done enough to turn off enough of the population.

Based in China isn't as much a problem as coming from all the same people -- but it's important to note also that not everything based from there is Chinese. Of course, I'm sure the ultimate beneficiary would still be majority Chinese corporations but I believe the percentage is getting slightly lower every time, plus the remaining pool is also getting more diverse. Same thing with nodes, also getting more diverse, though some exotic locations are dropping off.

They're also not all necessarily politically aligned even from the same geography, that's important to note.

Bitcoin's protocol doesn't just rely on the idea that no one will get 51% of hashpower to avoid getting attacked, the point of PoW is to make attacks so expensive that it would deter attackers from doing it. So, theoretically miners could try it, but it would be hard to profit from it, and it won't be sustainable in the long run. Also, from the point of view of miners, it's like killing your goose that lays golden eggs - if their attack is successful, it would cause panic and drop the price, thus reducing their profits from mining.

In theory, if the Chinese government wants to destroy Bitcoin, then it is quite capable of collecting 51% of the attack power, but I can’t imagine why they will need it. If miners, bring money that they spend for electricity, and other expenses that are only for the benefit.

My point is that this has been discussed many times already. I have said my piece, it's not worth a try.


You talking about 2140? Again, why not look at the current circulating supply? We are closer to that 'almost all bitcoin have been mined", specially in the next 3 halvings: 2024 , 2028 , 2032. 1.5625 Bitcoin for Block ->225 Bitcoin every day. So it will be really costly to try and pull this 51% attack.

In the nation like China, they (the government) can do nearly anything they want. But I believe Chinese government know what will happen if they take serious management on bitcoin mining pools in their nations. Huge changes on the crypto industry and they won't get benefits from such management actions. In contrast, it will cause another switching waves out of China mainland. The Chinese government won't do this in my opinion because it is better for them to have something like a half-strict management and still get many benefits from bitcoin mining pools there.

that only considers bitcoin's mining incentives. the real danger of highly concentrated mining inside china's borders are incentives that are external to the bitcoin protocol.

here is one possible motive for such an attack: the chinese government forcing miners and mining pools to attack the network under threat of imprisonment.

now you might say this is an unlikely scenario, and maybe you're right, but it exemplifies the problem of thinking about this issue purely in terms of the bitcoin protocol. if the chinese government wanted to crush confidence in bitcoin this is one possible option---and since they can leverage the capital of miners (instead of their own) they can do it at virtually no cost.

This answer is closer to the point. In a time of WAR, the Chinese miners would be funded by a war effort to destroy Bitcoin. 

Does the US make any components anymore?

Are we already a vassal state of China?

The whole picture changes if BTC goes to 10 trillion. That kind of money topples governments or the government topples the miners within it borders.

TSMC (Bitmain's chip supplier) is building a semiconductor plant in Arizona. They will be producing 5nm chips 4 years out from now so I'm not sure how relevant it is to BTC, but it could be a sign of things to come. https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/14/tsmc-to-build-a-12-billion-advanced-semiconductor-plant-in-arizona-with-u-s-government-support/

Supposedly miners (and ASIC manufacturers) are slowly but surely heading to North America:


https://decrypt.co/27777/bitcoin-halving-could-bring-way-more-mining-back-to-north-america

Logically its "stay profitable" not "more profitable". So when there are more people who quit mining, the difficulty will still be reduced.

In my opinion, the price increase is better than other reasons that you mentioned since that other reasons also make the risk for the potential attacker becomes lower.
The chart of bitcoin network difficulty shows overall improvement and I'm sure its caused by what you said about the improvement of miners equipment that also becomes cheaper. This means the potential attacker can also have a higher hash rate easier than before.

So I can say that when this thing depends on the bitcoin price so it also depends on the potential buyers who want to buy bitcoin at the higher price indirectly. What if they don't want to buy it at a higher price?

And a high transaction fee is not good for the long term because people will hate to do a frequent transaction or at least make them think twice before making a transaction. So there will be fewer transactions.

But on the other side, this makes us realize the price of bitcoin will have a high chance to increase because it has to increase.

Ohhh?? I don't know the relation between your answer and the thread that you mentioned because you didn't explain it.

So whats your calculation about the 51% attack cost in the future?

Anyway, do you really think the purpose of this attack is only to get "more" bitcoin? And the equipment won't be able to be sold again?
If the case is as mentioned by figmentofmyass, the goal is not to profit from getting more bitcoin.

So it's clear that if it's more centralized as if more than 60% hashrate is actually gathered in 1 country, it will bring more risk to the bitcoin network.

It's still not fully external, attacking costs money, so even if miners are coerced to do this, they will run out of money sooner or later. The government can try to then spend their own money, but what would they achieve? The network will be down only for as long as the money are being burned, and imagine the public outcry when regular citizens will find out that their government wastes millions that could have went to healthcare or education.