Bitcoin Forum

This came up as a side discussion in another thread, and I thought it would be interesting as a top-level discussion here.

The notion is this: although taking over 50% of the Bitcoin hashrate would be a practical impossibility for any private actor or even a small country, China, as a country, has at times hosted over 50% of Bitcoin's hashrate, and it's thus plausible they could make this happen again if they wanted to.

And whomever controls over 50% of the hashrate can dictate the software in use, and/or dictate the contents of the blockchain. As the theory goes, if China wanted to wreak havoc on the world economy, or if it wanted to extract a ransom, or if it simply wanted to profit by inserting its own blocks, then... it could. They could do anything. Perhaps China could decide that Satoshi's blocks should be given away to charity. Maybe they change the architecture so that it worked better in China, or conformed to their "laws" or something.

So this brings up questions:

1. Is this technically possible?

2. What would be the technical implications of China doing this?

3. What would be the geopolitical implications?

4. What would this do the broader cryptocurrency sector?

5. Have major governments e.g. the US and NATO countries ever (publicly) announced any contingency planning around this problem? Putting a $1.5T asset at risk is something that could rattle the entire world economy. This seems like something they would at least think through?

Looking forward to people's thoughts...

For further discussion, here's an old article talking about this possibility:

https://www.investopedia.com/news/bitcoin-wont-win-worldwide-adoption-because-china-controls-it-ripple-ceo/

Obviously the hashrate for China has changed, but my thesis here is that it definitely could happen...

I wonder why you're even taking China into consideration on this because they will always have the reason to adopt their own CBDC and enforces their citizens to adopt the same as well, then cant raise support for the use of cryptocurrency, because its not what is going to make them regulate the economy as they wanted, while bitcoin is even a decentralized digital currency, i don't think any of these is possible to happen in the future with them because right from the onset, we already know the way they have always been fighting against the use of crypto within their country.

1. Yeah, pretty simple if you're willing to spend enough.
2. What technical "implications" it's a 51% attack, it happened before on a number of coins, we have the precedent
3. Zero
4. A big dive followed by a migration to the next best coin, and the revelation that the majority is interested in the returns now the coin
5. You're overreacting, nobody would really give a damn, 1.5T in market cap doesn't mean 1.5T in wealth for the US, even now at least 70 billion out of those are locked in Satoshi's wallets, more are lost, a shitton is held by other people in other countries including China, as for rattling the world economy, common...Bitcoin lost 3 years ago 1 trillion in market cap and it wasn't the end of the world.

It’s definitely possible and knowing China, I know they will do everything to get it done especially if it is the way to get something they want (and they want a lot of things). I can see China doing this for political gain, how? That I am not sure but one thing’s for sure if China were to take control of 50% of bitcoin investors might lose some confidence on the coin.

Bitcoin is worth over one trillion dollars. China is a criminal regime that likes to steal things :). They don't have to "love" Bitcoin in order to try to steal from it, or hold it hostage, etc.

China's current policy with respect to Bitcoin is to forbid their banks from holding it as an asset on their balance sheets. If your plan was to screw around with Bitcoin, that's the... first thing you would do--get your country's banks out of the way of the damage.


I pretty much agree with all of that. The point about this not being a major geopolitical event is well-taken: that's both a reason China would do this (because they could score a cool $1T in winnings from their crime) and also a reason they would not do this (if the effect would be negligible, then why even do it).

So I agree that the actual affect on things wouldn't cause a major disruption, the "terrorism effect" could potentially give them some reason to do it (maybe in concert with a bunch of other things as a lead up to invading Taiwan).



I get that, but they would too, and they'd probably have a careful plan about what they'd do in a careful sequence. For starters, they would probably work to hide the fact that they had control of a majority of servers. This wouldn't be very hard to do: they could have control of major US miners right now and we wouldn't necessarily know.

The fact that Bitcoin has marketcap over $1T is not making it important to global economy. Was $1T actually invested in it? No, it's just the result of trading at high price multiplied by total supply. Bitcoin could crash to zero tomorrow and it won't affect the global economy because there's like 200-300 million people who own some Bitcoin, and only some percentage of them would be ruined financially if that happens.

But don't worry about it, Bitcoin can't be taken over easily, because it's a global network of thousands of computers and mining has proof of work, which makes it very expensive to take over.

While I agree that it wouldn't be some kind of global catastrophe, I think that in this thread at least, we've established that China absolutely could take control of Bitcoin if they wanted to...

China is more concerned about their money being used by their people. it will be more disastrous for their CBDC.

i don't think they can take over Bitcoin, they may however have more than 50% but more countries will do the same if they have plans like this. BlackRock who is somehow investing in mining farms can also do the same. it's just a battle of hashrates. but won't it just end up having their own BTC fork and they will just be the only ones who will be using that forked coins?

Don't over work yourself because the tasks available are merely simple and easy for everyone to accomplish but most people wouldn't give such setting and always in for the promising projects. Bitcoin can be manipulated based on the price value of the system, secondly followed by whales and top companies. It's never appreciative to always been on the winning side and losing sides comes with different pattern. We're learning everyday and making crucial mistakes.

If they are trying to destroy the network they would keep posting empty blocks and if the bitcoin nodes fork the chain then the attacker will redirect the hashing power to the forked chain to continue the attack. So if a 51% attack happens we'd have to wait for the attacker to stop, spin up more hash power or change the proof of work algorithm.

How exactly would you know who the "attacker" is? Nodes are nodes...

In this case the nodes aren't the attacker they are the ones trying to save the network by forking it. The attacker would be who ever is posting empty blocks

Could China (or similar) take control of Bitcoin? And my answer is Yes everyone can control of bitcoin if they had enough money and enough resources

And if you talk about a country it definitely can do that, 51% attack is doable right? And then if you want to do price manipulation you can buy as much as bitcoin and then can be act as a whale. Tho this is just my opinion guys

They can't do that even if they go full dictator mode on people that are still using bitcoin in their country, they're also going to hijack a lot of networks to be able to do anything significant and it just so happens that most of them is spread throughout the world and there's no way that China would be able to conquer the world, they're a boy in a man's world when placed together with Russia and USA, they can't even make a decisive move and win against Taiwan. China is also falling apart economically and I don't think that they're going to see any point trying to control bitcoin because they're currently lacking the money and they're currently squeezing too much money from their citizens because their officials are risking having their lavish lifestyle being lost.

It currently cost 32mil USD worth of power per day to 51% attack bitcoin based on the block reward of 200-250k. This is easily doable for china. The other hurdle for a 51% attack would be to get ahold of all the mining hardware needed but china basically has control of bitmain. so china could turn out all the asic miners they need for a cheap price compared to other countries. might only cost 2-3 billion. So yeah china could easily shut down bitcoin. They haven't yet because theres no need to. However if bitcoin was adopted by some NATO allies and NATO sanctions china for invading Taiwan then China would 100% shut down bitcoin in retaliation of NATO sanctions.

This is not a very accurate statement.
There were multiple mining pools that were inside China and a lot of hashrate (many of which was located outside China) connected to those pools. Pretty much the same thing is happening with pools in other countries like the situation that is growing in USA.
That is a big distinction to make because in this case China did not and could not "control" that hashrate.

Not quite.
With a high percentage of hashrate, one can perform certain attacks but they can not change the consensus rules (if that's what you mean by dictate the software in use). They can pull off 51% attacks to double spend but what would that achieve except kill Bitcoin?

They also won't be able to attack Bitcoin for long in my opinion because such a move would bring on a lot of public outrage which could even lead to a hard fork changing the mining algorithm.

Bitcoin is not big enough to have an impact on the world economy. Not to mention that if China wanted to do that, they would do it without needing something as small as Bitcoin. For example they could dump the US bonds and crash US economy and burn half the world's economy with that. Or simply stop exporting goods to certain countries including US and EU and crash their economy by causing hyperinflation,....

That logic is flawed in this context.
If you have hashrate you "insert" your blocks and make profit. If you perform an attack, you'd crash the price and doesn't matter if you mine 100% of the blocks, you won't make any profit.

That requires a hard fork which means it requires the entire network to accept that change and upgrade to a new software. Otherwise they'd create an altcoin and what they'd sped would not be Satoshi's coins.

Similarly requires a hard fork.

Any kind of attack on Bitcoin would first crash its price. Depending on the attack it could be significant which means a lot of the goals you listed above would never be reached (like making profit).

Bitcoin is not big enough and is not weaved into the geopolitics to have such an impact.

It would force developers to get off their fannies to start working on decentralizing mining more. Like introducing a much better protocol for mining pools. :)

I'm more worried about US performing such attacks on Bitcoin than China doing so.
For starters, China doesn't have any significant hashrate ever since they banned mining. And also China is not known for destabilizing global economy like this. In fact China prefers more stability in the world so that they can make more money.

US regime on the other hand benefits from chaos, whether it is armed conflict that fills the pockets of the "Lords of War" or it is economic chaos where they can pull off their Ponzi scheme commonly known as the dollar.

China is a dictatorship, and as such they would have central control over whatever hardware physically resides in the country. Of course my scenario also includes other ways China (or some other big country) could achieve this by taking over other servers throughout the world through force or bribery.

As for the rest of your points, I think you're missing the fact that current holders of Bitcoin would be held hostage by somebody who took over the network. You say "people won't accept it" but people... want their investment back if it is threatened. I think of China (or whomever) did a hard fork, brokers and individuals would be incentivized financially to go along with lest they lose their investment.

Don't get me wrong, I'm talking about a hypothetical scenario here, but clearly somebody who tried something like this would probably think through the ways that they would be able to get everybody on their side, even if reluctantly so.

How would they score 1T, such an attack will only make losses, them having 51% of the mining power doesn't mean they own the coins, at most they can harm the value but there is no financial gain in this unless they double-spend.


I think this is something a lot miss when somebody is buying 100k worth of Btc that money are not really in some bitcoin fund, the actual money is in the pocket of the guy who has sold that BTC to you, and by the time you move your coins in cold storage they could have already been spent on hookers and Lambos, and funny enough, they moved not to the lambo but to the pocket of the guy that sold it, so the money is no longer there, it's just a price tag that somebody else might honor but again, it needs money for it.

That is the reason if MS loses its coins you won't see the economy taking a 10 billion hit neither would a fall of NVIDIA cause a global recession on its own. Much of that 1.5t is in unrealized gains, money that was never there in the first place.

I think that the ban on mining means that China doesn't want to take control of Bitcoin and doesn't care about it. Also, any country that tries to directly demonstrate its will and possibility of taking control of Bitcoin, will fail because in such case people will abandon it and move on to a different coin. Ask yourself, there are many cryptocurrencies and why is Bitcoin the most popular? That's because it's the most decentralized, the most adopted and most independent compared to other coins. If any country takes control of Bitcoin, then Bitcoin will lose the main value that makes it the most popular and valuable currency. If Bitcoin loses that value, then people will abandon it and move on to altcoins and the country will be left with control of coins that people don't want to use. That would be a waste of money and resources from any government, so that will never make sense.

from what i can tell: no individual or entity currently controls* the bitcoin network & it would be very hard to

* but what if i told you bitcoin has already been infiltrated from within? what if it was led down a path to make it unusable as money, it's been turned into a digital gold like token traded on wall st. it's just number go up technology at this point

no base layer privacy, no future proof on-chain scaling, lightning failing to gain adequate adoption - too expensive to run a node, transactions regularly fail, it's not easy to get privacy, still not fungible

i used to think roger ver was an idiot, now i realize he was right, it's just so hard to challenge the status quo when the media is controlled by a literal cult - they have a lot of influence over bitcoin & most of crypto in fact. monero is one they're trying to keep quiet because it currently works & provides real privacy to those who seek it (no you're not a criminal for wanting privacy - this is mind control by the state)

Well they could do that hypothetically but I still don't get why would China of all countries would want to do that!

You say it would "rattle the entire world economy" but I don't think so. Even if Bitcoin died today, it will only affect a small portion of the global population that has adopted Bitcoin (5%-10%).

What else would they gain if they had control of Bitcoin? A centralized and censored payment system in that hypothetical scenario.
Well they already have one that is pretty successful called Digital Yuan and last I checked its adoption was going fine and had already processed trillions of Yuan worth of transactions. And that only costs them a teeny tiny fraction of what it would cost them to actually mine bitcoin at large.

I currently run a node. Its not costly at all. The biggest expense was i had to upgrade my internet to allow >1TB a month of data. Which was an additional $20 a month.

Not sure what you mean by transactions regularly fail. I've never heard of a legitimate transactions failing on bitcoin

I actually do agree with you on bitcoin being a cult. It seems satoshi disappearing might have been a bad thing for bitcoin because now everyone worships him like a god and any mention of deviating from his original protocol is turned down.

I agree with this. A trillion dollar asset evaporating would probably cause a stir in the news cycle for a few weeks, but the world economy would be fine.


They certainly wouldn't do it in order to actually use Bitcoin for something. As I mentioned above, China has forbidden their banks from holding Bitcoin, probably because they find it too risky for exactly the reasons we're talking about here.

My scenario would be that a country would do it for terrorism, extortion, or plunder.


I agree with this, but I think the cult is starting to fade and people are starting to get more... real. You can only repeat a mythology for so long while the predictions don't come true before even the hardest of hard-cores get tired of saying, "someday...".

Today Bitcoin is a meme investment and nothing else. All of the hoo-ha about "challenging governments" and so on is falling by the wayside because it's clear none of that was ever true.

And the future of digital currency, in terms of mass adoption by consumers, is centralized (https://haypenny.net/whitepaper.html) :).

Have you got any idea of how much energy it would take to reach satoshi's blocks? 


It would probably lead to total collapse for years. 


Right now?  Not exactly.  However, with the passage of time, we're witnessing an increasing number of powerful entities seeking a share of the pie.  For instance, Blackrock recently made investments worth billions of dollars.  Do you believe that Blackrock, the world's largest asset manager with over $10 trillion in assets, would tolerate another country attempting to undermine their own assets like that? 

I agree with you (and others) that this would be no big deal to the world economy, but... Blackrock? Do they have a nuclear arsenal that I am unaware of? I'm pretty sure they are in no position to tell the CCP what to do...

This has been discussed for years, and there was a time when Chinese miners comprised the majority of the miners for bitcoin and people were speculating that these miners could just do a 51% aftack and destroy everything.

To answer your question, no, they won't do that. The money involved in bitcoin mining is huge right now that it will be a grave mistake to perform any of these 'control' in the network. People will notice immediately, and once that happens, see how bitcoin lose its value since they lost confidence to it. It is technically possible, but rationally it doesn't make sense at all.

I feel like if China were to do this it would only be to go procure another session of FUD for everyone similar to how they keep banning Bitcoin from their society just to get the price down so they can buy more. Talk about a power hungry country! Hopefully they never do this as I could see it being a devistating time for Bitcoin and definitely a lot of folks rushing to get their money out as welll.

China didn't ban Bitcoin from their society, and it's still perfectly legal for individuals to hold and trade Bitcoin in China. The only thing they did is forbid their banks and financial institutions from holding Bitcoin on their balance sheet.

That's for sure, that if half of the Bitcoin will be accumulated by only one entity be it China, other country or organization then they can easily manipulate the price fluctuations of it. Since they have the most liquidity, once they sell in large amount then price also will fall a lot. Same in on buying aspect where price could trade up higher easily by their own manipulation in price and supply. However that's not even true yet. Most BTC are in cold wallets and others were missing. That's why BTC is a great digital asset as how also complicated it is.

I would ask a counter question: If China, Black Rock, Elon Musk or anyone able to take control of Bitcoin, why they didn't do it till now? mining rigs are limited, even they have a lot money they can't own a lot mining rigs. If they want to buy mining rigs from other miners, not all miners will want to sell their rigs.

Says who? China and Hong Kong are different, China completely ban Bitcoin while Hong Kong accepts Bitcoin.

No matter what facts you include here. A nation cannot control Bitcoins. It’s designed in such a manner that no one can have manageable access on it. Yes nations can track the transactions made with Bitcoins. They can impose a tax on it, but there is no way possible they can control it. China always promises things with high values but never able to prove it or delivers it. Hence its not at all possible.

That story is old, and it's outdated:

https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2024/02/05/china-never-completely-banned-crypto/

Binance is doing $90B per month in crypto trading in China, so it's not "banned" by any normal definition. Individuals can still buy, sell and hold Bitcoin in China.

As of last September, China had 21% of the world-wide hashrate for Bitcoin:

https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/mining/by-country/

So that "ban" isn't really doing very much for that either.

Regardless, whether China did or didn't fully ban Bitcoin on their own soil isn't really the point of this thread. It was discuss the possibility of a country like China having the ability to take over Bitcoin. The answer here seems to be: yes, they technically could, but it's unclear what they would gain from doing so, so in lieu of a strong motive, it's unlikely to happen.



Any entity that controls 51% of the hashrate controls Bitcoin, and while that has never yet happened, it's certainly possible.

What you're saying is 51% attack forever on Bitcoin which is technically possible but not in reality and I doubt China will be interested in doing it cause it costs billions just to keep the control for that they don't get anything at all so there's no point of any government try to take control of Bitcoin in that way.

Theres no incentive to attack the network now but if bitcoin is to become more adopted by certain nations it will become a target. If a country like the USA ever tried to adopt bitcoin it would have to stock pile billions of dollars worth of ASIC miners to potential secure the network if china tried to attack it. Which i'm sure china would try to attack in times of war. So the USA will most likely never adopt bitcoin because it would be to expensive and uncertain if they could secure it. no way to really know how many ASIC miners china has stock piled. similar to a nuclear arms race.

Why would they now?

They already own the Oval Office.

Yes, they already have a lot of coins too.

China oppresses people I think.

North Korea oppresses people I think.

These people have control over freedom?

Wtf?

And it's not the people we see on camera either, those guys must be miserable. :(

It's the anon's.

The sun will shine on them one day, however.

They don't now, but they very well may in January of 2025. That's why the Chinese are doing everything they can to get Trump elected.

To take control of bitcoin, you need to take control of 80% if not all the networks and even at that moment, you'd still need a lot of power and money (for the equipment) to be able to pull it off and China's lacking in money already if you're keeping up with the Chinese stuff that's reported by investigative reporters so I don't believe that it's in their agenda to take over the bitcoin network anytime soon, pretty sure that whatever they're doing now, bitcoin or any cryptocurrency has no relation to it or anything like that.

Why would they need 80% and not just 51%?

China has no problem finding the money to build large scale infrastructure projects. I don't see how it wouldn't be possible for them to get 5-10 billion dollars worth of ASIC miners. Also with the current block reward it would only require 32mil USD a day worth of power to produce majority of the hash power. Based on my rough math this would require a 12GW power source and china has a large number of power plants to spread that over. For reference Chinas largest power plant is Three Gorges Dam with 22GW.

That's not last September, that's when the article was updated.
Cambridge, which is the main source quoted there stopped doing any kind of regional research at the end of 2021.
https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/mining_map
The 21% number is an approximation from December 2021!


You see this is why I love the contradictions people keep falling for in this field
On one side we have the pitchforks lighting up when we talk about bitcoin energy consumption as we compare them with Christmas lights and then we claim it's impossible to make an attack because it requires a lot of power which no country has...so...which one?

First, there is a mistake in the percentages, they don't even need 50% of the current hashrate!
They could simply buy 3 billion worth of equipment (resell price) so way cheaper produced and with that 30% added they would force a ton of other miners in bankruptcy, taking over the hashrate pie, so rather than adding 600exahash to subdue the current one they could simply replace them by bankrupting and making mining less profitable for other miners, while still making some money.
Instead of 600 exa costing 12 billion in gear, it could theoretically be done with half of that, again at resell not producing cost, Beijing municipality has a 110 billion yearly budget!

This is a good point. They could also cause a death spiral by getting 51% for just a few days causing bitcoin price to tank and miners to go bankrupt much faster and making it easier to maintain the attackers >51% hashrate. So might only require ~100mil worth of total power to end bitcoin. The limiting factor in both cases seems to be the ASIC miners but china has a monopoly on that.

Im not sure if China would have to build additional power plants for this or not. If so, that would greatly increases the cost to pull this off. They would need 12-20GW of power and I think China is capable of producing ~900GW as a whole country.

I don't know why I feel repulsed whenever I see a mention of China in relation to cryptocurrency, anywhere. I guess it has to do with how China let this industry down by banning crypto activities in that country in 2017. That action was one that hit me hard at the time as a newbie in this industry. Then China was in a lead position in the space with lots of mining hash from there. That was then. In today's reality  I don't think anyone should as little as accord China a second thought once this industry is concerned.

It's still legal to hold and trade Bitcoin in China. All they have done is precluded their banks from holding Bitcoin on their balance sheets.

China still contains a sizable percentage of worldwide Bitcoin mining, so it is by no means "banned" there.

And even if China hated Bitcoin, that doesn't mean they wouldn't attempt to take it over.

In as much as China is against the utilization and bitcoin adoptions,China could possibly want to totally get all round control over bitcoin.
However,China's competence to completely take control of bitcoin could be at 0.1 level.Before ever any country wants to authoritates bit coin,she should be capable of solving at least the threatening and consumable activities that are going on or going to occur.
China will not engage bitcoin or whatever they intend doing to bitcoin cannot be predicted or managed under normal circumstances.

True and the conditions are like that if we pay attention. Well, of course China currently has a large percentage in terms of hashing network dominance and potentially in terms of their future dominance of BTC but my view is they are not major key players in the current global cryptocurrency landscape and that is just their Long-Term Strategy.

Simply because everything will lead to a shift in the world economy, of course, it is unlikely that it will be controlled and fully and will depend on one country or single player because many things and factos also affect the growth of this industry.

1.It is technically possible, but the costs are higher than the potential profits.

2.What technical implications? I don't know what you are talking about.

3.I don't think that China taking control over Bitcoin will have any geopolitical implications. Maybe the only consequence would be the USA and the western world Banning Bitcoin.

4.If China takes over Bitcoin, most of the BTC developers, miners and users would fork BTC and move to the forked version of BTC. The version of BTC that was taken over by China would become useless and worthless(which makes the whole process of "taking control over Bitcoin" totally pointless).

3.

Am going to speak from the point of recent happenings and it is that, China is really and firstly more interested in making the BRICS currency their own local fiat currency, of which is the Yen. They want to dominate and along with other interested countries, create a new world order that means dedollarization in essence.
It is quite possible that China could decide to tweak cryptocurrencies or create a new kind of Blockchain that may have its own coin specific for the Chinese community, but that has already been done as we see Hashgraph technology being almost similar to the blockchain and even if China does decide to create its own coin for it's economy, it still won't be as original as Bitcoin and that's a major consolation.

Around 50% of hashrate being under control of a certain company and located in China is a very different thing from China as a state being in control. China seems to have chosen a policy of avoiding and restricting Bitcoin, with an exception to Hong Kong.
I don't think that any major economy would try to nationalize major Bitcoin mining farms to gain control of hashrate, and I don't think it's that simple to do it because if someone suddenly creates a huge demand, the prices (for mining equipment and mining companies) will rise, so it'll be a race. There's just not enough motivation to attempt to do something like this and to spend tons of money on it.

Bitcoin miners, if don't have their mining ASICs physically and geographically installed in China mainland, but are in other places, can quickly configure their ASICs and connect them to other pools.

China ban on Bitcoin mining years ago only cause a Great Mining Migration to other countries around China and to the USA. It did not kill Bitcoin network but make its stronger by being more decentralized. China government opened a Pandora box years ago.

Because Hong Kong is still not fully under control of China in politics and other things. China mainland government always want to bring Hong Kong back to their control and will continue to do this in future.

Yuan, not yen, the yen is Japan's currency!
This is actually funny when people talk about de dollarization and China replacing the $ but half of the population doesn't even know their currency name!


As long as you don't change the algorithm the attack will not cease, and changing that and render all legit miners useless will be just as bad, and even so will just earn you a bit of time till they build the new asics. Even PoS will not be a solution, they could simply buy their validators and good luck stopping that!

In theory, there's no specific amount required to launch a network attack.  You only need at least 50% to sustain the attack indefinitely, although, as you rightly pointed out, initiating such an attack would likely lead to a significant drop in price (unless the attacker exclusively mines empty blocks, good luck moving coins in that case, lol).

The pressing question is: Why would China or any other nation undertake such an action?  What would they stand to gain from it?  Investing in and implementing new tax regulations could offer them benefits, providing additional revenue sources for their tax systems. 

If China did that there would just be a Fork, one way or the Other, China would Fork to their New Chain, or a Rebel Organization, maybe Bitcoin Foundation at that Time might be considered the Rebel Cause at less than 50% Consensus, and then they would Fork. Someone would Fork. And this was like the 1999 to 2000 Bug where Everyone thought the Missiles would Launch and we would all Die, when this Happened with Ethereum it was just nothing, it was no Big Deal, both Chains actually Continued to Work because some People didn't Switch.

Ethereum did it because of a Hacker, but if there were a Serious Disagreement it would be the same. Like how Aggroed Wrote a Steemit Magna Carta and they all left and Created HIVE. STEEM and HIVE were Built for Forks. There is no Reason for those and BLURT to be the Only ones, there should be 500 Steemit Clones. But China actually is kind of mad about that maybe, or was and didn't understand. By now there should be Universities in China Studying the STEEM Technology, Graphene. And all of this Exists between China and kind of American Anarcho-Capitalists is who is on the Other Side.

Most People don't even Notice, but it does Shape some of the Finances in American Politics. STEEM Platforms Fund Travel, they are Travel Blog Earnings Engines once an Account is Established, and Travel is Part of it Regularly. And it is also a Political Finance Engine in the same way. STEEM Platforms can Finance anything, like GoFund me but Better, more kind of "Democratic" You might Call it. But there are still so few Platforms we could also say they are anything but Democratic because there aren't 500 Options with 500 Themes and 500 Teams of Devs and Business People Running them. But all of this is Good for Money, and if it Happened with Bitcoin, it would be similar. It would matter where it Mattered, and most People wouldn't understand it.

Most of the International Problems are about kind of Eastern European Hackers asking for Ransoms. That has been a Big Problem. But not just them, that is just a Generalization when I said Eastern European, a lot of the Ransoms do come from there.

It wasn't the Chinese government that were incharge of the 50% hashrate but it was individual miners located in China and they'll all have different beliefs so this attack isn't possible. We have core believers of Bitcoin that are miners in China and they won't want anything to happen to Bitcoin Blockchain so they won't be in support of the Idea if it gets proposal by the government. We aren't the only ones tired of the government centralized fiats system and wants
a decentralized currency to succeed so you can forget about this thought of yours, nothing is happening to the way Bitcoin was built to operate, if after so many hard forks, nothing has happened and the Bitcoin Blockchain hasn't been affected, there's nothing any government will do to take down Bitcoin and be successful. The Chinese government have probably thought about this and didn't see a way they can pull it off.


They first have to accept Bitcoin before they can start planning any counter measure if this event was to come to reality but since the governments don't care about Bitcoin they won't have plans for this in their books. The Chinese governments are attacking Bitcoin and other related services in their country, other governments are doing the same thing in their various countries so what we should be more concerned about is the government coming to an alliance and try to ban Bitcoin globally instead of having this thought of yours but I get it as it's a discussion that shouldn't be swept under the rug.

Going by the population of China and their technological advancements, China has the potential power to take control of the Bitcoin technology if they chose to. I am saying this on the basis of the two factors I mentioned earlier, which are the population and the advancements in the technology of the country and amongst its people. Although, we do not know the founder of Bitcoin by identity due to his anonymity, however, from his name, Satoshi Nakomoto, he is an Asian by thoughts and could have come from those axis. Interestingly, China is great enough to take charge of the financial technologies but may not be able to do so, because the government in itself have banned the adoption of such.

51% is smaller than 80% but why only 80% and not 100%, for it to be sure? Hehe. Yes they have a good budget but I think they aren't only interested on it because if they do then they already did it long time ago and there will ever be no banning that will occur in both BTC and BTC mining. 2 to 3 billion dollars and 32 million a day worth of power is a lot of money and all of this is for the hopes of controlling BTC?

But, what can they get after this? To earn more profit? However, I think people will stop supporting BTC once they figured out that it is now fully centralized and China can only get a bad reputation which I'm sure they don't like for it to happen.

But OP, I want to ask you why China wants to control bitcoin and what is their purpose? Have you ever thought about the scenario if China or any country controls bitcoin but the rest of the world bans bitcoin to avoid manipulation from China, would controlling bitcoin be beneficial?

Remember that bitcoin's value comes from its decentralized nature and if someone can control it then it means it is no longer decentralized so no one needs it anymore. The idea of controlling the bitcoin network makes no sense, so I never thought this would happen.

Several posts here have made the point about whether China would want to do this, but that wasn't my question. My question was whether they could, and the answer to that question is yes.


China or some other country or entity with similar resources could absolutely take over Bitcoin if they wanted to. Decentralization makes a network resistant to a take-over, but no network is takeover-proof.

Talking about whether China or any country can control bitcoin or not, I think there will be no exact answer. The answer "yes" is just everyone's speculation, none of us know the true strength of the Chinese government, how can they arbitrarily give such an answer? Also, if you consider that they can control bitcoin, that means they can also destroy it but why haven't they done that so far and can only issue a ban?

No country is strong enough to control, stop or destroy bitcoin. That will only happen if all governments join hands, but this scenario is even more unlikely. That's why governments that don't like bitcoin can only issue a ban and can't do anything else.

 

No, as we discussed here, China absolutely could take over Bitcoin if they wanted to, as could any country with their resources. I agree that they probably don't want to, but that doesn't mean that it's impossible, or that Bitcoin is some sort of magical force that can withstand any conceivable attack.

China has banned Bitcoin several times before and the announcement of this ban by China had a huge negative impact on the market.  But that negative effect didn't last long so I think China alone won't have much control over Bitcoin.  However, China has a large number of investors and these investors can have a great impact on the Bitcoin market.  However, it will not be possible for China alone to take complete control of the Bitcoin market.

For 80% the point would be that if you want to change something in the chain, like for good, as in "take over" then you need 85% to be exact not 51% because that is what the rule literally says for blockchain. Just for example, BCH tried to change bitcoin's blockchain, they got rejected, people didn't use it and people just ignored it, that is how it worked, we didn't accepted their offer, however when we added segwit, 85%+ suddenly accepted it and now we can use it, that is how it goes.

You may ask "why" but that number wasn't picked by us, that is just how it works and we go with it, like saying "why 21 million and not 42 million?", we didn't pick the 21 million neither, and that was just something that bitcoin had when it was started, same goes for all those logic questions.

I think China is one of the countries that hasarge numbers of Bitcoin in their portfolio and that would keep growing soon.
We can always make money from Bitcoin if we are able to hold which is what many investors are practicing so a better future.
It is important we look for ways even though we might not have the funds to invest but their are things we can do to earn extra funds and invest it in the market. I think China could be the largest holders of Bitcoin after the United States

That's your opinion and I respect it but I still won't change my opinion and won't be convinced unless you have proof of China's power that can actually take over bitcoin. Do you work in a Chinese government agency or any other government agency? Because like I said, if they can do that then they can destroy it too, but why is it all just a ban now and they can't do anything else with bitcoin?

I don't belittle or underestimate any government but thinking that they can do whatever they want is not necessarily true. There will still be barriers, things that they will never take over or destroy, which is why bans, blocks, warnings...are created.

And what proof do you have that it can't be done other than your belief?

All this is simple math on equations we know, we know the network is protected by roughly 600Exahash, we know we need roughly 2.5 million new generation ASICs worth around 12 billion and drawing 10GW of power to overcome that.
We know the central budget of China is 3.5 trillion, we know their total installed capacity is 2.2 TWH.

So why do you think it would be impossible?


You're confusing the unwillingness to do something with the inability to do it.
This is the same as VPNs , China could at any time kill them all since they control everything there, they will simply ban every gateway out of their GFC but they don't go to extremes because they want to give the people the mirage of freedom, if they will feel threatened by it, you're going to see what authoritarian control means.

Bitcoin is being regulated by governments because a lot of consumers are using it, and like anything that becomes a part of consumer financial life, problems arise. But these regulations ultimately help the market because it makes it safer for your average consumer to enter it, and reduces social downsides (e.g. terrorism and criminality).

And while I agree with everybody here that it's currently unlikely China (or some other big country*) would want to do this to Bitcoin, it's important to understand that it's absolutely possible.

(* On another thread, we've discussed the possibility of the USA doing this if Trump was elected, so he could kill Bitcoin and force everybody to use his own personal currency instead--for instance...).

Controlling the network wouldn't yield any profit but if your enemy uses it as a reserve currency taking control would be catastrophic to them. If NATO or USA adopted bitcoin like el salvador then China would have a reason to take down bitcoin.

China can only be part of those countries that adopted BTC for the growth of their economy which China have done before, before they discovered that it will make their fiat money useless in the country that made them to begin to create another alternative for their people to get connected to centralized currency to ignore cryptocurrency in the country.

BTC is a decentralized currency, which China cannot control to achieve their goal like the way they use to control their fiat money to grow and develop their economy, because they have all the strategies to make their currency pump and dump but they don't have such strategy on BTC.

The fight is still on in their land, but it will be difficult for China to stop everybody in their country not to buy or sell BTC secretly without the notice of the government, which many bitcoiners are still engaging themselves into cryptocurrency investment.

As we've said several times in this thread, China could absolutely take over Bitcoin if they wanted to if they threw enough money at the problem by taking over the hash rate.

In other words, China or some other very large entity could effectively centralize control of Bitcoin if they wanted to, and then do whatever they wanted with it.

Bitcoin is not a myth, it's a piece of software, and it's important that investors understand how it really works as opposed to going by hype concocted by holders of Bitcoin.

I don't think it's wrong for you to say that historically this has been the case but not all Chinese items will be controlled. Unless the inventor of BTC is also Chinese, it will be easy for China to master the technology and all the important items in BTC.

If it is possible to dominate the largest number of holdings, it is possible but controlling is certainly not.

What does Satoshi have to do with anything? He doesn't control Bitcoin in any way. I don't think you understand how Bitcoin... actually works. You really should educate yourself before you post.

And being a holder of Bitcoin doesn't make any difference either.

Again, if want to learn how Bitcoin actually works, you should read this thread from the beginning...

Recently, he began welcoming Bitcoin donations, a shift that occurred a few years after he boasted about the dollar and dismissed Bitcoin as a scam.  It seems he has now recognized its potential.


A nation cannot control Bitcoin; its only option would be to attempt to destroy it entirely.  Bitcoin cannot be subject to China's censorship and still function as intended.  It either operates as intended, or it does not. 

Yes, and that should scare the hell out of Bitcoin investors because that means he knows cryptocurrency is a way he can make money.


Any entity that took over 51% of the hashrate controls Bitcoin. That's the way the system works. It would be enormously expensive for any individual or even a group of billionaires, but relatively straight-forward for a major country like China.

Now, if you mean "as intended" as in the original idea of Bitcoin, then it doesn't even operate that way today since most Bitcoin holders do so in a centralized way through a broker or an app. Today, in actual fact, Bitcoin is simply a meme investment instrument for almost everybody who holds it.

Yeah could be possible only if China is willing to spend a whole lot of money just to take control of the Bitcoin market no doubt about that as we all know how clever chinese when it comes to money making or business or almost anything. But I think if China has to do this thing they are just wasting their time for it unless they have something that will benefit their intention.

That could be possible for me but I doubt any party will take the risk of crashing Bitcoin because all of these powerful nations are currently having trade wars, tensions and military expansion so why do they bother spending more money into something that could possibly delay their country's progress right? Nowadays, countries all over the world are busy pumping their military expenditures for some reasons.

I wouldn't argue that Trump endorsing Bitcoin is beneficial for investors, but why should it terrify them?  He's simply another public figure attempting to capitalize on it.


If you possess 51% of the hashrate and utilize it for Bitcoin mining, you're not controlling Bitcoin; you're *simply* earning significant profits.  If you own 51% of the hashrate and use it to censor or reverse transactions, you're effectively undermining Bitcoin, which, in my opinion, doesn't constitute control but rather destruction.  If Bitcoin suffers from 51% attack(s), there is no longer a Bitcoin to control. 

I guess China has all the chances to control bitcoin if they really aim to. Simply because they hold more than 50% of bitcoin and certainly act as a big whale that will take control the movement of bitcoin. Same like India and US that hold more than 50% amount of bitcoin, they can also take control bitcoin if they really want to. But we all know China is definitely more controlling more than other countries. Not just for bitcoin, but even in other valuable assets that continue to become more valuable in the future.

I don’t think that it is possible but with what you have narrated, China could cause a huge impact if they wanted. And if it happened, The technical implication of it would be FUD. People will be scared of losing their funds. To the broader cryptocurrency sector, confidence will be gone, miners may want to diversify geographically to avoid such from happening again.

With how China experienced being unsuccessful with bitcoin in the previous years, I guess currently is still not different. They might hold more than 51% of bitcoin but it would never guarantee that they will successfully take control of bitcoin now. Yes, they might certainly affect the price of bitcoin and that’s never new for us, but that’s only for temporary, they can’t still take full control of bitcoin no matter what.

China, the US, and Russia are big countries that have been providing quite a lot of hot news regarding crypto for a long time. But that doesn't mean they can control crypto easily. Because in the crypto business there are many interests, and they don't just come from 1 country. In fact, this is from various countries and includes other large countries.

However, no matter what happens and what happens in these big countries, the statements that are issued will usually have an effect on profits. but not control

I have to agree with you. Bitcoin can hardly become in control with any country even if it’s China, the most influential and the most controlling country in the world. We’ve seen how many times it failed with bitcoin, and even if there are big miners and owners of bitcoin in China, that won’t create a warranty and assurance that bitcoin will be easily controlled by them. Bitcoin is way more highly decentralized, so any country or government who wish to take full control for bitcoin might only fail but may leave a huge impact on bitcoin itself.

LOL, because Donald Trump doesn't play the game that way.

Trump won't pump Bitcoin because Trump doesn't own Bitcoin. He would make far more money by destroying Bitcoin and forcing everybody to use his thing instead. Trump could make trillions doing this, which is far more than he could make with almost any other sort of corruption.

And with the full power of the US presidency--and his absolute control of Congress which he seems to have--he could very easily "push the button" on Bitcoin in favor of "TrumpCoin" or whatever.

Bitcoin went up 500% under President Biden. The safe bet here is to stick with the stable state, not take a chance on somebody erratic and corrupt like Trump.


That's not how blockchain works. The network is effectively a majority vote. There is no "center" of the network ("decentralized"). There is no "person" in charge, no committee, no non-profit group, no "community" who would "object" to this takeover. That's not how it works. If it worked that way, then Bitcoin would be effectively centralized.

Bitcoin is simply an algorithm that holds a vote on hashrate. Anybody with 51% could hard-fork Bitcoin, holding everybody's blocks hostage.

And in a hostage situation, most people would simply want their money to be safe, and they would bow to the new owner.

As others have discussed here, there's no evidence that any major government would want to do this, but they absolutely could do it.

Give me a detailed financial analysis of how they're going to do it.

For starters, they'd need 3 fabs like TSMC (Taiwan) to solely manufacture ASIC chips and nothing else...

Do you realize how expensive it is to create a state-of-the-art 3nm fab from scratch?

Do you realize TSMC is already chock full of wafer orders from Apple, nVidia, AMD etc?

They're not going to abandon their loyal, long-time customers just to manufacture ASIC chips and perform a hypothetical 51% attack, because even if they could (I explained you the impossible logistics), chances are they would want to mine and hodl a guaranteed income of 3.125 BTC (+ fees) every 20 minutes on average (half the hashrate, half the blocks).

WEF & BlackRock closely cooperate with China. Apparently it's their "role model" (yes, they'd love a technocratic dictatorship being imposed in the West):

https://blog.independent.org/2022/12/01/klaus-schwab-china/

They don't like democracy, it's too... "messy":

https://x.com/JunkScience/status/1626220779766710273

Klaus Schwab himself has admitted that they built China the last 30+ years.

I suggest to wake up, before it's too late... the game is rigged (West vs East, good vs bad cop). BRICs are a controlled opposition by WEF and they plan to serve SDG/Agenda 2030.

Closely cooperating with China is very different than controlling China.

I closely cooperate with my local police when I obey their traffic signs. That doesn't mean I run the police department.


Why exactly would they need to buy a single machine? They could simply appropriate the hardware already sitting within their borders. Servers in China once accounted for far more than 51% of the Bitcoin hashrate. They could do so again with a single executive order from Xi.

Regardless, what seems like a lot of money to us civilians is pennies to a major government like China. $20 trillion buys you a lot of computers (again, that's assuming a country with a 1M strong army needs to "buy" anything).

And presumably the prize would not be the mining fees, but rather a percentage of the 1.5 trillion in Bitcoin.

Do you even understand the concept of a hard fork?  It's unrelated to hashrate.  A hard fork occurs when the consensus rules are altered, allowing a previously invalid transaction to become valid.  For example, if you validate a block subsidy of 100 BTC, you've initiated your own hard fork.  Good luck persuading others to follow you. 

And no, it's not possible for someone malicious with 51% of the hashrate to validate invalid transactions.  Miners are only capable of arranging the sequence of transactions.  If a malicious miner controls over 51%, they could opt to mine empty blocks or reverse transactions, effectively undermining the fundamental principles and game theory behind the system.  If Bitcoin were subjected to such an attack, it would cease to function.  There would be no remaining mechanism for control.  Get it now? 

Until now I still can't think and believe that China will be able to control Bitcoin, even 50% of Bitcoin investors, Bitcoin has a strong community and also loyal Diamond Hand, if China wants to control Bitcoin then they must have at least half of the number of Bitcoins in circulation. and this is impossible, how much money do they have to spend, so the percentage of China controlling bitcoin for me is only 1%.

Its technically possible to control that 50% and requires huge investments to achieve, and btw in the case of China you make this sound like it's one state owned entity running the show when in reality it's several independent entities that represent this virtual control under the umbrella of being labeled China ::)

It's actually more complicated that you make it sound, think of it like a car.. For a car to be functional several systems have to work for it to move, say the fuel system, the oil system, suspension etc and when it comes to Bitcoin... miners are one such system that contribute to its smooth running of it and for the record are not independent but are dependable on other systems such as nodes, etcetera. So this havoc you talk of is not possible as they need to also own a huge amount of bitcoin for a coordinated attack on the network otherwise if they had miners and owned a huge chunk of BTC they would have a shot at this...

This now sounds liked a forked Bitcoin which would make it an altcoin and by the way before a fork happens a consensus has to be reached and not some dictator move to make things happen!

Do you even understand how software works? Code can be changed.

And China would absolutely "persuade others to follow them" because they would be "persuading" a bunch of servers running in computer room. There are no people involved in the Bitcoin system, which is the whole point. You have this wrong-headed notion that Bitcoin is some kind of "community", which, while on a daily basis it is in places like here, that "community" could be overridden by an entity with more servers. Bitcoin's "consensus" is not among human beings, it's among anonymous servers. Plug in a majority of those to the network, and whoever or whatever controls those systems controls Bitcoin.

If there was a "central governing body" of Bitcoin, like you keep implying there is, then Bitcoin would not be decentralized in the way it's advertised to be. That committee could simply be compelled to do whatever governments wanted them to do.

And yes, if China (or whomever or whatever) took over Bitcoin, people would grumble a lot, but most would be so terrified of losing their holdings that they'd do anything the entity wanted. The price would surely go down, but every major holder of Bitcoin would be running advertisements 24/7 saying, "everything is okay". (So in a way, Bitcoin is a PoS model after all :)).





Yes, but at some level China comes down to one controlling entity, and even one man. Think of their nuclear weapons, for instance. There's not some rogue faction somewhere in China who could launch some of those.


Yes, I get that such an attack would be an extremely complicated operation, which is why it's implausible that some "small" country could pull this off. But China's GDP is $18T, their military budget is $230B, and they have over one million personnel in their army, some of whom would surely be pretty good at reading Bitcointalk to see what would need to be done :). (Of course in reality they'd probably recruit a major Bitcoin mining company or maybe a few of them to go along, using bribery or extortion or whatever).


As I said above, if something like this were to happen to Bitcoin, the first thing an average investor would hear is, "remain calm and HODL". Nobody would want the price of their Bitcoin to go down, so they would live whatever fiction they'd need to live in order for its price to stay up. Major holders would buy TV ads and stuff.

Again, in a way, Bitcoin is a PoS model, too :).

Sorry to bring this to you but you don't understand how mining and Bitcoin work.
Miners mine blocks, and nodes can only choose to refuse them, they can't create blocks,  if a miner has 51% of the network there is no way for a node to know whether the blocks come from a good or bad miner, the nodes must follow the protocol, them refusing the longer chain is a breach of that protocol.

Somebody controlling more than 51% of the hash rate has control over the transactions, while he can't spend you funds he will always be able to invalidate your confirmed tx by broadcasting a longer chain without your tx or without any tx, and there is not a thing that you can do to stop him, you can't even properly identify the blocks as coming strictly from him, he could disguise his hashrate as being owned by 10 pools.


Consensus? Nope! Has anyone asked for your vot e don't he implementation of segwit or taproot?
Show me your voting id!


Seriously, you've been around 2017 and you still don't know Bitocin is PoW not PoS?


Lol, so the whole world stopped producing chips while we built this 600exahash of gear that runs now?  :D
TSMC revenue is 70 billions, producing 12 million wafers a year, the needed gear is worth (with other components and retail price) 8 billion, only using their 7nm capacity to produce chips it would take then 2 and a half months to produce that gear, again only for 7nm chips.

It's clear that you're not familiar with the mechanics of the system.  You can't sway others to your side without presenting valid arguments.  Discussions, proposals, social interaction are necessary for consensus.  China could acquire a significant portion of the hashrate, but it doesn't grant them the ability to dictate protocol rules unilaterally.  Consider this: if hashrate grants this control, why don't the miners simply increase the block size or create new bitcoins arbitrarily?  It's their power, right?   


Once again, you're not getting it.  Sorry. 

How you see things working is closely tied to the idea of centralization.  If control over protocol rules is solely determined by possession of computational power, then it's this dynamic that centralizes the network.  What makes Bitcoin remarkable is that anyone, regardless of whether they are mining or not, can fork the code and choose to participate in a new network governed by their own rules.  It's then their responsibility to persuade others to join their network.  This is decentralization. 

If miners representing 51% of the hashrate all decided to do something, then that would be the reality of Bitcoin.

Again, what is stopping them? What central authority can you point to who would stop them from doing anything they wanted?

Now imagine an entity like China either directly or indirectly controlled those miners. Now China controls Bitcoin. It's as simple as that. The "community" here on Bitcointalk or whatever could scream as loud as they want, but they don't control the hashrate, the nodes do. What "we" decided doesn't mean anything at all. It's a proof-of-work model, not a proof-of-how-cool-you-are-on-social-media model.




How I see things is closely tied to the evidence.


Well, in the case of Bitcoin, control over protocol rules is solely determined by possession of computational power. That's how Bitcoin works. It's called a Proof-of-Work model.

I wouldn't say that factor by itself centralizes the network, but the network is absolutely, positively able to be centralized by a single entity controlling 51% of the computing power. That's always been a risk for Bitcoin. Today it's arguably a small risk, but it is absolutely not zero. A Bitcoin takeover by a large entity is technically possible and even financially plausible, at least on the first order of things. Ironically, the entity who would actually defend Bitcoin against this sort of attack from a state actor would almost undoubtedly have to be... the US government.

Governments can do whatever they want. The only magic power you have as an individual is voting, and even that assumes you live in a democracy.

     China has always wanted that, but they couldn't do it because there were so many obstacles. They have been doing that for several years, but until now they still haven't been able to do it. That means they can't, and they aren't capable. 

     With the number of people these days who are interested in Bitcoin, especially now that there are other countries and institutional investors who are accumulating it, for sure the country of China will have a hard time.

Well, I am not a technical guy, and as such, I have no technical knowledge of how bitcoin and the bitcoin network operates, but based on what I've learnt so far about bitcoin hashrate, it's definitely possible for one entity or country to manage to control 50 percent of the bitcoin hashrate, but this is the entity or country will be able to afford the cost of this, and from what I know, we not talking about billions of dollars here, but something much more.

In the end, the entity or country with such motive may have to first of all ask themselves if controlling 50 percent of the bitcoin hashrate is really worth the expense and the hassle, when such one can easily create his or her one coin and try to make it as successful as Bitcoin.

The majority of people have become so attached to the old centralized system of money, the Fiat currency, that they don't understand how truly decentralized that Bitcoin is, And despite the government attacks on Bitcoin, Bitcoin is built in such a way that only fools or blind person would reject it, in fact, if you don't know the major reason why it seems the government is fighting Bitcoin is that they're scared and know that if they allow this technology to thrive that everybody will embrace it and likely abandon the fiat currency, thereby removing the central control or authority that government has from time, that's why they're using various means to try to fight Bitcoin.

So if it is to be something that the government could have easily taken over, This should have happened a long time ago. To me, Bitcoin has gotten to a stage of no return where it's unstoppable where to control the 50 percent Bitcoin hashrate would become difficult.

It's going to cost a lot of money for them to take control of majority of the hash/bitcoin network.

While they might be capable of doing that, I doubt it that they're going to spend a lot of money for it when they're facing a lot of issues geopolitically and economically. They will no doubt spend on military powers and increase their budget there but with Bitcoin, they even have been banning it for years on and off.

I still don't know why the world is so skeptical about China taking over from the United States. Would there be anything bad if China takes over? I don't see anything wrong with that but let's hope to see what would be the out of China eventually becomes the largest holders of Bitcoin. The United States cannot keep controlling everything but I think there would be nothing wrong if we see that China becomes the largest holders of bitcoins as a country. El Salvador is still accumulating more of Bitcoin and we should but be surprised that she has not enough Bitcoin compared to big countries like China and the United States.

 I see lots of people in this thread feel that since China holds a good percentage of hashrate of Bitcoin then it means they could manipulated the market in future but I don't think  so, what I think is that Satoshi won't be biased to make Bitcoin a decentralised currency that operates on it's own blockchain and influenced by it's volatility for it to later be controlled by a certain country, business sector cause they hold a good percentage of hashrate in it. That doesn't make sense to me and I believe it would ruin the whole concept of Satoshi towards the creation of Bitcoin.  Many governments are against Bitcoin cause they're not able to manipulate it's blockchain like they do with their various central banks and if they had the power to manipulate Bitcoin they would've done so before now.

Um, Satoshi doesn't control Bitcoin. Satoshi hasn't even been heard from in over a decade. He has as much to say about Bitcoin as George Washington does about the US elections in November.

The Bitcoin system is a proof-of-work model, meaning that the majority of the hash rate resolves disputes between nodes. If you control the majority, you control Bitcoin. It's as simple as that.


I completely agree, and I would summarize the consensus of this threads answers to be:

1. Yes, it's completely possible that China or some other major country like them could take control of Bitcoin.

2. There's no evidence today that they would want to do this, and there's even evidence that they wouldn't want to.


But if somebody says, "Bitcoin cannot be controlled by any government", they are not saying the truth...

They probably can do it, how much would it take to control 51% of the network anyway? Pretty sure that if they put their mind to it, they would probably be able to do it, I mean I have lived long enough to see that countries will do anything they want to as long as those things will serve their interests. The only problem is that would they be able to get the upkeep cost of running those 51% because they need to be able to do that without fail. Maybe the only thing that needs to happen is that we would see this happen, that's it, and then we would see if they can really do it.

That's pretty much it but with the latter part about telling that Bitcoin can't be controlled by any country or government. I think it's an understandable statement if someone says that because the entire network of it is owned by its community and the hashes are distributed globally. And by that means, no one can control Bitcoin but a huge part of its network can be handled and manipulated by which we called in real life "oligarchs".

No.  Bitcoin is not ruled by miners (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_is_not_ruled_by_miners).  If it was, they could alter the consensus rules and give themselves more bitcoin in block rewards.  So, why don't they?  They lack the authority to dictate the consensus rules.  That's why. 


There's no central authority, but it's akin to confronting a train with broken brakes hurtling towards them, and convincing the people aboard to adopt their rules is their challenge. 


In Proof-of-Work, miners hold full control over the order of the transactions, which enables a malicious miner (with sufficient hash power) to rearrange transactions, potentially resulting in double-spending.  However, this is the extent of their capability.  They cannot create new rules, or change existing ones. 

Here's satoshi's words, directly from the whitepaper (11. Calculations):

So who do you suppose dictates the "consensus rules"? What are their names? Where do they live? Who has this "authority" you keep talking about?

See, if they are identifiable individuals who could simply decide not to let certain servers join the network because they allege them to be unfriendly for the cause, then Bitcoin is by that definition absolutely, positively centralized. In other words, China (or whatever government) could locate and subpoena them and make them do their bidding.

But Bitcoin is not centralized. It's a proof-of-work model, and any server, owned by whomever, and plugged in for whatever purpose, can join the network and have a vote in the hashrate, which gives them a vote on control of the network itself.


Convincing whom?? Who are these "people" you keep saying need to be "convinced"? And what are they "convinced" by?

You don't seem to understand how Bitcoin--or any decentralized network--actually works. There is no "authority" who would "do the right thing" according to what "the people" want. There are no people involved in the decision at all.



Who is to say what is "honest" and "dishonest"? It's a majority vote. In that context Satoshi was talking about individual attackers or small factions that would do "bad" (as defined by the majority) things.

If the majority accepts a payment, then that's the law of the land. There's no person anywhere in this decision making process. It's entirely algorithmic. There are no "China servers" and "non-China servers". There are no "good servers" and "evil severs". Just... servers--servers that run software that can decide what is true and what is false. What is a valid chain and what is invalid.

And if people here on Bitcointalk said, "how terrible, this group of nodes is doing the calculations all wrong because they changed the software", you know what we, collectively, could do about it? Absolutely nothing. (Although, again, major holders of Bitcoin would fall over themselves to make peace with the new owners lest they lose their investments).

No one dictates the consensus rules.  Describing it as such is inaccurate.  The term 'consensus' stems from the Latin word 'concentus (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/concentus)', which denotes singing in harmony.  Harmony cannot be forced; it naturally emerges from the collective agreement which reflects a unified understanding. 


In Bitcoin, initiating a rule change involves public proposal and observing people's responses.  There's no need to individually convince anyone.  You propose the change, implement it, and then it's left to others to decide whether to adopt it.  If you enforce a change that breaks backward compatibility (like altering the supply cap) on your node, you're effectively outside the existing Bitcoin network, forming a new one.  Now, it's up to your convincing skills to persuade that this network represents the 'true Bitcoin'. 

???


Good. You are starting to understand. Now ask yourself, what if servers representing 51% of the hashrate adopted some changes that, say, the other 49% vehemently objected to? They would "win the argument", correct?

Now imagine that the 51% were operating under orders from the Chinese government, and thus adopted the fork that the CCP created for their own purposes, which included software changes that inserted their own blocks in place of other people's blocks.

There wouldn't be anything anybody could do about this, short of an act of war. American Bitcoin owners, ironically, would appeal to the US government to have their (eeek!) government pressure or otherwise make war on China for essentially stealing billions of dollars in American property.

Again, there's no reason to believe the China or any other major country with the kind of money to pull this off (figure, the top 20 economies in the world) are planning on doing so anytime soon, but it's absolutely incorrect to say that Bitcoin is "government-proof" or that it cannot be toppled by any government. Bitcoin exists along side every single product humans use on a daily basis that can be eliminated by government decree in a millisecond should the majority or the dictator favor it.

There's no debate to be won; that's my point.  People are free to run any software they choose.  You could modify the Bitcoin source code to increase the total coins to 21 trillion, effectively 'altering' the Bitcoin protocol.  The burden lies on you to persuade me to adopt it.  You don't require majority hashrate or financial dominance.  By creating another network, you've essentially birthed an altcoin.  No 'majority' is necessary for this action; that's the elegance of decentralized systems. 


Of course and there would be.  The solution is simple: don't run their software.  If the CCP modified the source code to increase miners' block subsidies, Americans could opt out of using it.  Consequently, we'd end up with two separate networks—one controlled by the CCP and the other by the rest of the world.  The CCP cannot force the rest of the world to use their network. 

The concern arises if the CCP aimed to dismantle Bitcoin through a 51% attack, which is currently possible.  This scenario is what would be beyond prevention and essentially constitute an act of war.  But that's not the point you're making.  You're arguing that China can control the Bitcoin protocol, which is an entirely separate matter. 

Sure, you may no longer want to buy Bitcoin after China has taken over the network, but there are millions of current holders of Bitcoin who would want to protect their investment. They would be stuck using the Bitcoin network, which will have been taken over by China.

(By the way, this who thread of conversation presumes one could even know which servers were "evil" and which were not--but in practicality that could be easily obscured by the attacker).


But not running "their" software is akin to throwing your Bitcoin away. Your blocks would be worthless. (And again, how would any individual know who "they" are in real-time?)

And why exactly would one want to create an alternative "Bitcoin2" in that situation anyhow, since China could just take over that one as well?

The reality is that if this happened, major holders of Bitcoin would make peace with either: a) make peace with the attacker to protect their investment; and/or b) appeal to the only military power in the world capable of protecting them. e.g. the US government, in order to forcibly make the attacker relinquish control of the network.

***

Understanding the implications of a truly decentralized network is hard to wrap your head around :).

Satoshi invented a scheme that no central authority would ordinarily control, but the only way to do that is by majority vote, e.g. democracy (in this case, democracy of computing power). In other words, a truly decentralized system cannot be governed by people it must only be governed by an algorithm. If individuals were able to simply choose their own servers to store their data, then bad actors could commit fraud and the network would be untrustworthy. In a decentralized network governed by proof-of-work, there can be no concept of identifying a node in the network because the only thing you can trust is the work, not the IP address, not the alleged owner, not anything else.

***

By the way, from the second paragraph of the Introduction in the original Bitcoin whitepaper, there is this line:

"The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes."

No, there would exist two separate Bitcoin networks: one in China and one outside China.  Bitcoin holders would receive an equivalent amount of bitcoins they hold on the Chinese network.  A comparable event occurred in 2017 with the launch of Bitcoin Cash. Guess what happened: many people exchanged their Bitcoin Cash for Bitcoin, resulting in an increase in their Bitcoin holdings.  


It is completely possible to view which node supports the Chinese rules.  


So, you're also relying on the assumption that all of the hashrate is owned by China. :D  Do you know that the Chinese government can't force miners outside its borders to cease operations?  

Yes, but how would you know which one is which? A node is a node. You couldn't just say, "I trust those node but not these nodes". There is no notion of known identity in the Bitcoin network, which is the whole point.

Again, you simply don't seem to understand the implications of a decentralized network. There is no "middle". There is no "community" that "decides".

And the situation with Bitcoin Cash was not even remotely comparable.



Really? How? Is every single wallet going to do the mining themselves? And why would you trust that wallet? Remember that in this situation, there would be millions of the "evil" mixed in with the "good". The only way to tell the difference is proof-of-work. Every single wallet, every single node, and every single actor in this situation is going to say they are on the "good" side. This isn't as simple as saying, "everybody will just ignore the bad guys", because there's absolutely no way to tell, in real time, who the bad guys are--and the software doesn't have any sort of notion of "opinions" in it in any case.



No, I'm positing here a situation wherein China or some other central entity inserts nodes into the network amounting to 51% of the hashrate. China (and probably about 10 other countries across the world) have plenty of money and computing power to do it.

And of course the assumption here would be that they would distribute their attack, e.g. coordinate servers in many countries, or even take over servers.

You keep assuming that the network "just knows" what the "right thing" is. That's not how it works. Bitcoin is an algorithm and nothing else. And if it were anything else, it would be... centralized!

You shouldn't be trusting nodes to begin with.  "Don't trust, verify" is the principle.  Chinese and non-Chinese nodes won't communicate, much like how Bitcoin Cash nodes don't interact with Bitcoin nodes.  They adhere to different protocols.


My friend, I'm honestly starting to wonder if you're trolling or simply lacking basic technical expertise.  Anyone can span a network; that's the essence of decentralization.  You could create "Bitcoin 2.0", and it would work perfectly well.  But, you wouldn't be able to communicate with Bitcoin nodes because you've agreed upon a different set of rules.


And I'm clarifying for another time:  They cannot force us to follow their new rules.  Their authority (in Proof-of-Work) extends only to determining the order of transactions.  If they were to alter the rules, they would no longer be part of the Bitcoin network.  This would result in a chain split, with Bitcoin holders having two separate "Bitcoin" networks.  While Chinese holders might prefer their Chinese network, they cannot compel the rest of the world to adhere to their lead.  

Allow me to illustrate it this way:  If the CCP mandated their miners to enforce a new cap of 21 trillion BTC, the rest of the world would lose all Chinese hashrate, as Chinese miners would be working on a separate network.  

Yep, and the way you verify a node is the work it performs. If it performs the work, it's a good node. If it doesn't, it's not. That's all the software knows.

Therefore there would be no way of telling what is a "good" node and a "bad" node. They are all just nodes, and it somebody takes over 51% of them, they win.



Quite the contrary, you continue to demonstrate that you simply don't understand how Bitcoin even works. You continue to reference a central authority that is going to "disagree" with bad nodes that does. not. exist.

Anybody can create a Bitcoin node and join the network. Anybody. Anybody. Not join the "Bitcoin 2.0" network, join the currently operational "Bitcoin 1.0" network.

How do you suppose Bitcoin's current nodes got there in the first place? Did they ask permission of that central authority you keep saying exists somewhere?


How would any software, in real time, know they are altering the rules?

And for the umpteenth time here, nodes on a network don't have different-colored skin, do not speak with an accent, do not have a red flag with a star on them, and so on. There is no way of knowing what is a "Chinese" node or an "Iranian" node or whatever country is trying to do this.


How would the "rest of the world" actually ignore servers they thought were bad? What actual technical mechanism would be employed. Please show me the source code of the algorithm that wallets would employ in order to bypass the "bad" nodes in favor of the "good" nodes.

This is simply not how Bitcoin works. People do not decide for themselves which nodes they will talk to, because if they did, the system would not work.

And this bears repeating because it's crystal clear that Satoshi himself understood the risk of the network very, very well:


"The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes."

Nope, a node that imposes a cap of 21 trillion isn't considered a 'good' node, regardless of the amount of hashrate they possess. 


I am NOT referring to any central authority.  It's the nodes within the current network that will refuse connections from nodes using different protocols.  What's hard to understand about that?


They connect because they adhere to the same protocol.  If one of them makes even a minor alteration to the protocol within its client, it no longer remains part of their network. 


If a node from China connects to one from outside China and the Chinese node sends a transaction that's only valid according to Chinese rules, the non-Chinese node will refuse it and potentially blacklist the Chinese node. 


Lmao, they do.  It's called consensus:  https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Consensus. 


This has nothing to do with protocol rules.  If you actually read satoshi, it explains the system's defense against 51% attacks, where one exploits their hashrate to double-spend.  It doesn't have to do with altering the protocol rules of other clients.  That's impossible without their consent. 

"Considered" by what??

You keep inventing a central authority out of thin air.


Obviously any sort of "bad" node would use the same exact protocol. Do you think an attacker would include a header that said, "hey, I'm a bad actor" on every packet?


Yep, and any network of bad actors would use the same protocol. Obviously.

Maybe I should have made that clear in the beginning here but I assumed that was obvious.



Yep, and consensus is a majority vote, and in the context of Bitcoin nodes, that is a major vote of hashrate. There are no people involved in this consensus.


Yes, the 49% can object all it wants to the actions of the 51%. But that doesn't matter. The majority wins. That's what consensus means.

The scheme Satoshi came up with is to ask the network and get it to effectively vote, using their hashrate, against the "bad" actors. But the "bad actors" are only defined by what the majority thinks is "bad". If the 51% says the 49% is "bad", then the 49% is bad. End of story.

By every node that runs the original Bitcoin rules. 


Non-Chinese nodes will reject transactions from Chinese nodes if they violate the rules, effectively resulting in the same outcome as being blocked for being considered 'bad'. 


You're mistaken.  Take another look at the pages I referred to earlier, you've clearly missed them.  The majority vote doesn't pertain to protocol rules but to the order of transactions.  If it were otherwise, miners could arbitrarily inflate their rewards, which isn't the case.  Ever wondered why this doesn't occur?


If the group controlling 51% of the hashrate changes the protocol rules within their nodes, they effectively detach from the network of the remaining 49%.  The 49% then becomes the new 100% of their existent network.   

The attackers nodes are going to "run the original Bitcoin rules" as far as everybody is concerned. There would be no way, pragmatically in real time, to tell the difference between a "good" node and an "evil" node.



Again, how on earth would you know if the sever is "Chinese"? The IP address? That's not reliable at all.

And guess what: the Chinese nodes would reject the non-Chinese ones, which would result in a dispute, wherein the majority consensus prevails. In other words, it would be the non-Chinese servers who would be considered the attackers, and the Chinese ones considered the defenders of the network.


If the majority of the miners did this, then... their rewards would be inflated and that would be the new law of the land. (Moreover, I would posit that

For the umpteenth time here: THERE IS NO CENTRAL AUTHORITY.

You keep inventing one here out of thin air. But there isn't one, and because of that, the only thing you are left with is majority rule, which necessarily must be enforced lest the network be completely useless since everybody could otherwise simply choose their own authority.


Correct, but the 49% would be the irrelevant ones, not the 51%. Control of Bitcoin would automatically revert to the 51%.

You seem to be stuck on two false notions:

1. That there exists a central authority controlling Bitcoin. There isn't one.

2. That you could pragmatically tell the difference between a "good" node and an "evil" node in real time. You can't.

Individual human outsiders could identify could, after the fact, identify nodes that were doing the wrong things, and they could, for instance, complain about it here on bitcointalk.org. But they could not affect the real-time operation of the network, which is governed by an algorithm, not a central authority, not "scientists", not "concerned citizens", not "smart people", etc. etc. It's just an algorithm, and it's proof-of-work.

A node that imposes a 21 trillion coin cap is not running based on the original Bitcoin rules. 


Based on the rules it enforces, just like how a Bitcoin node and a Bitcoin Cash node recognize they're operating on different protocols, even without explicit IP ports and flags, they would eventually blacklist each other.  This occurs when they send each other transactions that violate the rules specific to each network. 


So, you CANNOT explain why miners aren't tampering with the consensus rules to increase their rewards, despite the fact that they have the capability to do so.  Why would they invest billions of dollars in energy, when they could inflate their rewards at will? 


It's you who creates the notion of a central authority that compels users to adhere to a specific set of rules.  I'm explaining the reality.  People have the freedom to join or leave any network they choose, and the majority of hashrate cannot hinder this.  Bitcoin Cash serves as a prime example.  If things operated as you imagine, Bitcoin Cash wouldn't exist because there wasn't a 'majority rule' that led to its creation. 

The rules according to whom? You? Me? Sure. The actual algorithm that the Bitcoin network uses? Not so much.


I did explain, and the answer is simple: if 51% of miners agreed to the price increase, then that would be the price.

You simply cannot get off this idea that there's a central authority controlling Bitcoin.



Yes, people have the freedom to either hold Bitcoin or not hold Bitcoin. They, individually, do not have the ability to decide what servers are "good" and what servers are "evil". That is up to a consensus also known as a majority vote of hashrate.

Bitcoin cash is not Bitcoin and never was Bitcoin. Satoshi's Bitcoin blocks were not affected by Bitcoin cash, nor were anybody else's. The Bitcoin network--51% of it--ensured that Bitcoin stayed Bitcoin. If the majority of miners decided that Bitcoin cash was the primary system and the "old" Bitcoin was the fork, then that would be the world we're now living in. But that didn't happen.

The algorithm that the Bitcoin network uses was written by satoshi and remains unaltered.  Me and you cannot modify it, while remaining in the network.  While we have the freedom to alter it, such actions would promptly lead to their expulsion from the network, effectively creating another altcoin. 


This doesn't answer why they aren't doing it. 


I have NOWHERE stated the existence of a central authority that dictates rules.  My argument supports the absence of such authority, it's just you who doesn't get it.  People are free to write and employ software of their preference.  Regardless of the amount of hashrate voting for a consensus rule, it doesn't change reality.  If 51% of the hashrate favors a significant change, such as modifying the 21 million rule, it merely results in the entity no longer being part of the Bitcoin network.  This isn't an imposition by an authority; it's the organic consequence of decentralized nodes ceasing to interact among themselves. 


If the majority of miners had shifted to Bitcoin Cash, then Bitcoin Cash would have become the prevailing norm.  However, this analogy differs because Bitcoin Cash solely rised the block size, a measure that had been under consideration since 2010 but was never enacted due to disagreements among developers.

Your argument presents a completely different scenario.  If Chinese nodes altered the 21 million rule to 21 trillion, opposition would arise from people like you and me, regardless of the hashrate.  It would inevitably collapse on its own, as users would refuse to adopt it. 

More FUD from the Ripple CEO... or should I say the new Ripple CEO. God what is wrong with those people? If they think that their shitcoin is better than Bitcoin then why don't they try making everyone use it?

---

The short answer is that if an entity ever came close to controlling over 50% of the hash rate, the miners would disconnect from their pool and join another. Unless it is a pool-less miner like Foundry. How do they have money to buy all those miners anyway? Venture capitalists?

Huh? You can alter whatever code you want to alter. There's nothing physically preventing you.

And yes, if a few of us entered the network with altered software, we'd be kicked out. Kicked out by whom? The majority.


The same reason why Americans haven't declared war on Greenland: because the majority doesn't want that. I don't see why this is so complicated.


If everybody on the network could simply use whatever authority they wanted, individually, then the network wouldn't work since everybody would use nodes that increase the value of their blocks for instance. The algorithm--the proof-of-work algorithm enforces a majority vote among nodes in the context of a dispute.



No, it's the 49% that is no longer Bitcoin, and the 51% that is Bitcoin. That's not what I want, or what you want, but that's what the algorithm wants.


That's not what this scenario imagines. I very much doubt the Chinese or some other major attacker like that would increase the number of blocks, but rather they would do other things advantageous to themselves e.g. seizing Satoshi's blocks or perhaps simply holding the whole network hostage for geopolitical purposes.

No, we wouldn't be part of their network.  We would have established an independent network.  If suddenly, an entity with 51% of the hashrate enforced a 21 trillion cap rule out of nowhere, they wouldn't be accepted by the network.  They would be mining on their own blockchain.  I genuinely wonder why this concept is so challenging to grasp.

We wouldn't be kicked out.  We would have created our own network. 


The majority of the miners don't want to earn billions of dollars worth of bitcoin.  That's brilliant argument!   :D


Okay, you refuse to understand the reality.  Could you demonstrate the algorithm which allows the majority of the miners to enforce their own consensus rules? 

Not accepted BY WHOM??. You keep in saying the mysterious "they" will not "accept" these nodes. How would this happen? Who are "they"? Why do "they" get to kick nodes out of the network whereas the others don't?

Again, you are inventing a central authority where there isn't one. It's an algorithm, that's all. It resolves conflicts in the network by the majority vote of the hashrate, that's all.


Well, they don't. I would suspect the reason is that many of them are actually major holders of Bitcoin and don't want to denigrate their investment. Also, this would require coordinated collective action. If one miner did this unilaterally, they would lose money. They would need to convince the people running all of the other nodes to follow them, and even finding those people would be next to impossible, let alone convincing them to raise their rates.

Once again, there is no central authority no matter how logically convenient it is to invent one. There is no "miner's union". There is no "spokesman for all f the miners". There is no "miners trust" that represents all of the miners, allowing them to collectively make decisions. Indeed, this is the beauty of the Bitcoin network: there is no central anything.

And this is hard to wrap your head around since everything in our society had thus far been based on centralized power structures, such as tribe councils, governments, unions, community groups, and so on. Bitcoin doesn't work that way, and I think it's really, really hard for some to grasp the implications of that.



They don't "enforce their own consensus rules", they use the consensus rules to their advantage because, since they are the majority, they prevail.

Here's another quote from the Bitcoin docs:

"Only if you acquired a majority of the network’s hashing power could you reliably execute such a 51 percent attack against transaction history (although, it should be noted, that even less than 50% of the hashing power still has a good chance of performing such attacks)."

https://developer.bitcoin.org/devguide/block_chain.html

Here's another article talking about the "51% attack" on Bitcoin:

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/51-attack.asp


Look, if you don't want to read any of this, I think we're wasting our time here. This is going around in circles...

Let's say you're running the original Bitcoin protocol with its 21 million coin cap.  Now, imagine I show up with a modified set of rules and send you a transaction where I award myself 1 million coins.  Even if I control all the hashing power, your node wouldn't accept that block because it violates the rules you're following.  It would be deemed invalid.

There's no central authority here.  It's a decentralized system of nodes, each enforcing its own set of rules.


They're afraid of "denigrating their investment," lmao!  All the miners need to do is come to an internal agreement—it's not like they can't work together, they already do through mining pools.  If they want more rewards, they can simply propose it to each other.  That's the exact opposite of "denigrating their investment". 

And who's going to stand in their way if they're the ones making all the decisions?  ;) 


The 51% attack targets transaction history, not consensus rules.  That's why I asked for the algorithm, it's clear that you don't know what you're talking about.  Gaining 51% of the hashrate only gives you the ability to reverse transactions, nothing more. 

In that scenario, my node would be meaningless as I would no longer be considered part of the network by the algorithm. The attacked would be Bitcoin and I would be not-Bitcoin.


An "internal agreement". Oh, you mean the Miner's Union, right? Or was it the Association of Bitcoin Miners (ABM)? Or some other central authority you keep inventing out of thin air?


It gives you the ability to make the software do whatever you want it to do. You don't seem to understand how software works in general. Once a fork owns the network, then that fork (assuming it's controlled by a coordinated entity) can re-write the software in any way it wants.

You don't find it strange that the whole world recognizes the specifically-named "Bitcoin 51% attack" except you?

I've wasted my time engaging with a troll.  The entire world recognizes the 51% attack as "double-spending", not "rule changing".  If you had actually read the whitepaper, you would have noticed that satoshi himself refers to double-spending.  In fact, he emphasizes that arbitrary rules cannot be enforced at will:


There's not anything else to say.  Satoshi himself agrees with me. 

He was not talking about a 51% attack there, merely a "20% attack", etc. The arbiter of what is the "true chain" is... the 51%. And double-spending is... what you would do if you took over the network. Indeed, the entire reason the network exists is to prevent double spending, so if you don't prevent that, then nothing else matters.

Regardless, you've moved the goalposts, which I guess is a good sign.

Bitcoin can be taken over by China or some other large country capable of capturing 51% of the hashrate. If you want to call that something else, then fine. But the bottom line is that it's not "impossible" to take over Bitcoin, only very very difficult and available only to large nation-state actors.

But the notion that Bitcoin is "impossible to take over" is a false one.

He clearly emphasizes that a 51% attack, which is what an attacker's chain growing faster than the honest is, does not grant the attacker arbitrary power to change the protocol.

I find it surprising that you, and seemingly no one else that I've encountered, hold the misconception that 51% of the hashrate can dictate protocol rules to the remaining 49%.  I wonder what other misconceptions about Bitcoin I will come across in my lifetime. 

Ever wonder why people talk about the "51% attack" on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies? Doesn't it make you wonder what they are talking about?

And I think the majority of the posters here--and most of the ones who have engaged in the conversation in a non-superficial way--acknowledge that such an attack is possible.

But it it makes you feel better to think that it's "impossible" to corrupt the Bitcoin network even for a major superpower like China, I guess you should go ahead and... feel that way...

They're talking about an entity that possesses enough hashrate to rewrite the entire blockchain or render the network inoperative by generating empty blocks. 


I don't consider it "impossible" to successfully execute a 51% attack, don't misinterpret my statement.  What I find impossible within these networks is the ability to enforce your protocol rules on others without their agreement. 

Theoretically possible, but practically it would be a very expensive attack on the network, which the community and the Economic Majority will get consensus to kick the attacker out of the network - merely for one double-spend. For all of that money spent on buying ASICs and all of that effort on the logistics in setting up their mining farms, it would be more viable/profitable to actually mine Bitcoin, and get paid in Bitcoin.

Again, incorrect. Bitcoin is a proof-of-work model, not a proof-of-stake model like some other cryptos out there. There is no such thing as an "Economic Majority" with Bitcoin. The only majority that means anything with Bitcoin is the work (hashrate) majority.

And presumably any entity that launched an attack like this wouldn't buy a single ASIC, they would merely take over existing systems, either by legal decree or clandestinely.

Although we could perhaps agree that it's debatable, the Economic Majority in Bitcoin are those who are willing to build things/services that provide more value to the network/community. It's hard to dispute that fact, because if no one from the community follows the miners then how are miners going to be incentivized by a distribution of coins that are going down in value?

The miners' hashing power majority are not the "all-power" in the network. I believe the UASF proved that. The miners could play a political game, but actually, all they want to be is to be incentivized for the security provided. But IF ALL of them are taken over, then the same problem, the community will probably get to consensus to change the mining algorithm. Perhaps, I don't know.

Plus a 51% attack will give the majority hashing power to censor transactions, not actually steal or change wallet balances. The army of full nodes will reject/not let those transactions/blocks propagate.

Bitcoin is an algorithm, not a sentient being. There is no human decision being made when a wallet connects to a node, and no human decisions being made in any other important part of the system.

I'm sort of blown away here that, for all of the talk of decentralization around Bitcoin, many don't seem to fully understand the implications of that.

There is no "owner" of Bitcoin. There is no "committee" determining Bitcoin's pathway for each transaction. There is nothing to compel nodes from taking the recommendations of a central committee. There could be a "consensus" achieved among humans in some virtual room somewhere, but that doesn't mean anything if 51%+ of the nodes adopt it.

And while the nodes couldn't actually change the contents of people's individual wallets, that content is rather meaningless if the network doesn't agree with it. In other words, nodes could simply re-write the chain and make up whatever fiction they wanted. If somebody complained and said the chain integrity was false now, they'd effectively reply, "too bad, we're the majority hashrate and what we say goes".

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Reading your post made me very confused if you're confused, or I'm confused.

https://cdn.imgchest.com/files/6yxkca3aae7.jpeg

Neither the content in your post made sense, nor did it show that you were trying to understand the point that I was making. Sentient being, what?

But OK, you do you.

Sorry about that. I'll try to clarify.

There are a few responses to this thread that seem to indicate that there is some central authority of people controlling Bitcoin, which there is not.

Most people know that fact alone, but then go on to imagine... a central authority controlling Bitcoin. In other words, they say that if somebody attacks the Bitcoin network in some way, "they will get together and stop it". But who is they? There is no "they". There is just an algorithm written in code. That's the whole point of decentralization.

My point about there being no "sentient being" was just to illustrate that code is not sentient, it just does what it was programmed to do.

Hence if a majority of the hashrate was taken over by malign forces, the software would continue to do... whatever it does. It doesn't matter what people think.

As we discussed in another thread, right now there are two mining companies that make up over half of the Bitcoin hashrate. If these two companies were compelled by a government, or infiltrated clandestinely, or extorted then... the attacker would effectively control Bitcoin in its entirety, and no human being would be able to say any different even if "experts" knew exactly what was happening after the fact.

You can't kick anyone from the network! Permissionless!!! Remember?
Some miners could collude on accepting only on building their blocks on top of each other and ignore blocks mined by 'the and guy" but as long as the attacker has a 51% and thus more work in it every node will accept their chain, nodes won't be able to tell what is good and what is bad, ghash double spend attack showed that pretty well.
And even forking the chain won't do any good either, that attacker will just abandon their chain and do it again on the new "true" fork, there is absolutely nothing hat can be done in this scenario that doesn't imply centralization and that's just as worse.

As for the money thing, we're talking about a superpower trying to bring down the network if it sees it as a threat, if you are willing to spend 300 billion to bail out your friends to not have your Belt project canceled,  6-8 billion in bringing down a currency perceived as more dangerous than the USD will be looking as peanuts.


It started as this:

So we're talking about an evil entity bent on destroying things and bankrupting others, economic incentives turn into political ones and the math behind costs and targets is completely different.

I don't believe they'd be able to do that, there's bound to be a resistance from a lot of people and at the same time, it's also really difficult for someone to maintain that kind of control because when people get the wind of the scheme of taking control of the network, the community will definitely find a way to make sure that bitcoin wouldn't be succumbing to that control. Also, wouldn't the developers be able to do something about it in the case that bitcoin network gets controlled or something like that? Also, look at China's perspective when it comes to this kind of thing, they don't see the long-term benefit of controlling bitcoin because bitcoin isn't as global as it should be right now, if they really want a way to disrupt the economy, the best thing that they should do is to put all of their efforts into creating their own dollars, what I mean is creating superdollars, that's the way to make things destabilize especially in a USD driven global market.

But if an Actual Attack threatens the very existence of Bitcoin, then the community will altogether get community consensus to defend it, no?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Plus do you actually believe that it will depend merely on the plebs of BitcoinTalk to defend the network? The Core Developers, the miners, and the economic majority will defend it.

About "what if", I accept that it's possible that Bitcoin could be "controlled" by a state-level actor. BUT it would also be possible that the Core Developers, the miners, the economic majority, and the community/users in general will fork away and be in the chain that will be called Bitcoin. The state-level actor chain will not matter, it will be Govcoin with centralized control. Haha.

Bitcoin's value is derived from trust. I don't think no government wants to fully control it but theoretically if they did, the day a government controls Bitcoin, it's dead. No one would use bitcoin and just move into another coin. Controlling itself might have more than one explanations but anyway it's not a good outlook.
I guess in past at a moment of time, it was technically possible for even a single private company to take control of Bitcoin but they not only didn't do that but also out of moral responsibility decreased it's share so that it won't be capable of taking control of the network. They could have controlled it but no one benefits from it and bitcoin loses it trust.

There are no people controlling Bitcoin.

There is no "community" (in heavy scare quotes) controlling Bitcoin.

Randomly organized "developers" do not control Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is an algorithm. It is in no way centrally controlled, except by a majority of the hashrate.


If some entity took over the current Bitcoin chain, it's all of those people you mentioned who wouldn't matter. Anybody, including those people, are free to start over with a completely new network and new blockchain, but the current $1.5 trillion in Bitcoin would be controlled by the attacker, not them.

How? Tell me how you can defend against such an attack, let's say that China manages to get ahold of two similar-sized farms like Anpool and Foundry,  from block 848009 to block 848022 those two pool have managed to mine 13 out of 14 blocks, how and why would node reject them? How would you ban their blocks?
There is no actual mechanism to "defend" against what is a valid block!



Again you seem to not understand that even if you fork your chain and keep being legit you have no way to stop the mining entity with 51% attacking the new chain again, this is what happened to ETC:
https://neptunemutual.com/blog/ethereum-classic-51-attacks/
as long as you're not able to have more hashrate than the attacker you're a continuous victim until you change the algorithm and that will last only until they get again the 51% with the new machines.

You keep saying economic majority, developers, miners, but what can they actually do?

Like every other persons have said, and as disappointing as this might seem, it's actually technically and practically possible for china to gain control of over 50 percent of the bitcoin hash rate, as well gain control over the network, if they are ready to pay the really high price required for such privilege.

But on the other hand, another question we need to ask ourselves is, if doing this will be worth it for them? I mean, can a government of a country as big as china, abandon all of her major issues, to want to squander their country's resources on taking over the bitcoin network, which also likely will put a very big dent in their reputation worldwide? I think the answer to this question is NO..
And aside china, no other country will want to try this, regardless of how rich and wealthy the country is.

Your debate is based on "what if", without giving a convincing argument how actually in the real world they will do what you believe that they will do. If it were that simple, then it would have already happened during 2021, no? 8)

Plus how would the full nodes reject them? Ser, all full nodes validate, and if any miner mines an invalid block and/or a block with an invalid transaction that goes against the consensus rules, then the full nodes will reject them/won't let them propagate around the network. They're welcome to waste energy though. They should either work with the network, or not be incentivized.


I accept that that will be a problem, and in theory a problem that will probably make Bitcoin a failure. BUT first WHERE is the attack?


If there is an actual attack to "kill Bitcoin", then Core Developers could propose a hard fork that the honest miners and the economic majority should follow, then the economic majority will neither list nor accept anything from Govchain.

The biggest mistake is to draw a line between not willing to, not caring enough to and being unable to do it.
Just because China doesn't care that much about it it doesn't mean they wouldn't be able to launch an attack, just as how you can't say that for example the US won't be able to launch a full invasion of Cuba, the fact that they haven't doesn't mean they can't.

It is a thing about how much they are willing to lose or to pay for that, everyone said that the prohibition doesn't work and can't be enabled, the middle east would have a story to tell. If everyone caught drinking alcohol in the US during the prohibition would be hanged like in Iran (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/07/iran-man-executed-for-drinking-alcohol/#:~:text=Under%20Iran's%20Islamic%20Penal%20Code,the%20fourth%20occasion%20is%20death.) I think the prohibition would have been a success.



The bad blocks will not be invalidated, they will just mine 10 empty blocks that will replace the last 8 blocks, then again stay hidden while good miners add the invalidated transactions in another 8 good blocks they again propagate 10 empty blocks denying again all the transactions. And while this happen all legit miners see their previous rewards destroyed and erased from history, how long do you think legit miners will be able to keep up the game?


Pray that there will never be one cause if it happens before the cost would be out of reach for even world powers we're f****.

That's a straw man. Plus didn't it cross your mind that "China not caring" might be because they know it would be a waste of time, money, and effort?

But if a state-level actor DID attack Bitcoin, and INDEED IF Bitcoin was "defeated", then Bitcoin doesn't have the right to exist. That merely proves that a better system must be built.


If an actual state-level attack will need to happen to prove Bitcoin's anti-fragility, then let them attack.

Aha, sure. Good luck going back to the first 210,000 blocks, and reversing years of history. And not only that: good luck rejecting existing soft-forks, which were activated at certain block heights, and writing a chain, where those checkpoints will be in a different block numbers, or with different block hashes, without alerting thousands of nodes.

More than that: good luck reorging thousands of blocks, from more than one halving, and triggering all block explorers, and other databases. And also good luck triggering all pruned nodes, that they have to re-download the whole chain from scratch, and rebuild their database. Good luck doing all of that unnoticed, without a single topic on the forum saying "ALERT! HUGE NETWORK REORG!".

Technically? Maybe. But if you ever tried to mine 100k blocks or more, even in regtest, with minimal difficulty, on CPU, then you know, how slow it is on CPU, when you can mine hundreds of blocks per second. And imagine, that you don't have regtest difficulty, but mainnet difficulty. Even using "the longest chain" instead of "the heaviest chain" means, that your regtest experiment is 2^32 times easier to execute. But if you take into account the current chainwork, then guess what: collecting one million newly-created BTC in fees alone is much, much more profitable, than executing such attack.

To sum up: mining new coins on charity's address is easier and more profitable, than forcing exactly Satoshi's coins to land there.

1. Rejecting existing soft-forks, and re-activating them under new rules (or leaving them unactivated).
2. Rebuilding databases in a lot of nodes in the world, triggering a huge debug log report for all node runners.
3. Triggering blockchain redownload for many, if not all, pruned nodes.
4. Alerting a lot of full node runners, that they are back in "Initial Blockchain Download" stage, which will cause a lot of questions.
5. Deciding to increase the supply or not, by deciding, if some coins should be burned in the coinbase transaction, in OP_RETURN outputs, and so on.
6. Seriously changing the total chainwork, so it will produce even more detailed debug logs in all node runners.
7. Being blacklisted by a lot of nodes, because of exceeding P2P network traffic limits, and being marked as "misbehaved node" by most of the network.

And so on, and so on. If you want to experience it, then use your CPU, run Bitcoin Core in regtest mode, mine 800k blocks, and try to trigger for example 600k block reorg. Good luck. If you see, what happens, when you do it on your CPU, with minimal possible difficulty, then you can go further, if you are patient enough to observe it.

Once I mined something like 250k blocks in regtest (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5479988.msg63437260#msg63437260). It took way too much time, to not be noticed, even if it would be some kind of public test network.

Edit: One more thing to note. Currently, developers are trying to kill testnet3. It is just a test network. It was resetted previously two times, and it is going to be resetted again. You can see, how many people are complaining about it. You can also see, how many people are complaining, where some altcoins are resetted, hard-forked, or changed without reaching consensus. Judging by that data, you can only imagine, how loud people could scream, if similar things would happen to the mainnet.

Even with fiat currencies, if you mess up with money, you can make a war. In the crypto world, people are even more focused on some values like decentralization, and all newspapers would be flooded by headlines like "BITCOIN HUGE CHAIN REORG" if you would try to even trigger more than 100 confirmations chain reorganization, not to mention more, like reorging beyond more than one halving, to get access to Satoshi's coins, and to not let them to be sent to Satoshi in the first place.

You wouldn't need to "reverse" anything. Just change the database. Or change the software to ignore the database.


And what exactly would these nodes do when they were "alerted"? Who would they complain to? And what difference would it make?

There's no central authority governing Bitcoin.
There's no central authority governing Bitcoin.
There's no central authority governing Bitcoin.

There is no "they" who will protect the network. It's just an algorithm. And it's proof-of-work, meaning the "owner" of Bitcoin is... whoever or whatever has 51% of the hashrate and that is it.


Again, you wouldn't need to mine anything. No calculations would be necessary. Just software that has had its rules changes and/or its database changed.

One more hint: there is two hours rule. Two hours is just 7200 seconds. By having five or six blocks with the same time, you can get something like 40k blocks. See? Only 40k blocks per two hours. If they are empty. If they can be easily verified in a fraction of second. If they are mined instantly, and you don't care about difficulty. For 400k blocks, you would need at least 20 hours. On localhost. With perfect network communication. With no missing transactions. With instant block validation, without bloated 1-of-3 bare multisig or other tricks.

See? In case of 600k block reorg, one day may be not enough to even share your great new history, written by the winners. Unless it will be empty, and you would say in your chain, that "Bitcoin was unused for the last 10 years, and all miners created empty blocks for that time".

Edit:
Then you will have an altcoin.

In case of Value Overflow Incident, the community noticed the flaw, and patched it, before even Satoshi released a new version. Later, he only confirmed that patch, it was applied much earlier by the community. And everything was fixed within 5 hours or so. When the network was in its infancy, and it was not as popular as today. When you didn't even have block explorers as smart as today.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_is_not_ruled_by_miners

Good luck convincing users to run your software. By starting from zero users, it is hard to compete. It is like saying "let's ignore Microsoft, we will deploy our own system, and we will legally force everyone to uninstall Windows". It is simply not gonna happen. What do you want to do? Shut down all computers, rejecting to run your software?

The 49% will have an altcoin and the 51% will have Bitcoin.


Bitcoin is not Microsoft, it's an algorithm!!!

That's the problem with your thinking RIGHT THERE. Microsoft is a centrally-controlled corporation. How different can this be from Bitcoin?

It's absolutely mind-blowing to me that some people can't seem to wrap their head around what the concept of "decentralized" actually means.

No matter what, people cling to the idea that Bitcoin is centrally controlled by some central entity--and said entity is universally benevolent, honest, and cannot be compelled to act negatively (per their own definition) by any force in the universe.

There was a short period of time, when BCH had more than 50%. Does it mean, that it was Bitcoin for a while, and they suddenly stopped being Bitcoin?

Sure. But you cannot ignore some existing product, and say "hey, people, I did it better, just buy it!". Full node runners can decide, that they don't want your new product. What then? Even if you have 51%, or even 99% computing power, it doesn't matter, if you don't have any customers.

The same I could say about "backward compatibility". You cannot release something completely new, out of thin air, ignore all existing solutions, and say to everyone "just try this new thing, because I want to sell it". You can have 99% computing power, but nobody would care, if you would produce strictly invalid blocks, containing garbage transactions, that cannot be properly handled by the current software.

Miners are mining blocks. They are selling this product to the users. Even if they have 99% computing power, it doesn't matter, if there are no buyers. They are not producing new blocks, because it is their hobby, and they want to kill time. They want to produce something, which users are going to accept.

It is not. But you cannot break backward compatibility, because you feel like it. In the same way, you can try to write some new operating system, or some new programming language, and say: "I don't want to use C". But now, C is no longer a language. It is now a protocol. And the same with Bitcoin: it is not just a coin, it is also a protocol. And if you want to bring existing nodes to your own network, then you have to talk to them, by using this existing protocol, or they won't listen, and you will reach an altcoin, if your coins are not compatible, and if people will be unable to convert BTC into coins, accepted in your network.

You could be surprised, how many different versions are currently running in the network. You don't have a situation, where 100% of the network is running the same, and latest version of Bitcoin Core. It is not the case. There are different versions, there are different configurations, and there are different kinds of nodes.

For example, you have some nodes, operating mainly on UTXO set, called "utreexo". Good luck trying to convince them, that UTXO-based model should be replaced by account-based model, or something like that. You have to stay compatible, with what we have today, at least to some extent. The same on this forum: you have to use English, and not "your own home-made natural language, because existing languages are bad". By saying "I am going to ignore the database", you are saying something like "I am going to ignore the existence of English, and write it in Quenya (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quenya)". Good luck convincing forum users to stick with your protocol.

Who are "you" in this scenario? How do you know what is the "Bitcoin product" and what isn't?

Hint: it's a list of nodes--a list of IP addresses. That's it. They don't have a "personality". They are not registered with any government. Users of the network do not know the people running these nodes, nor could they. And IP addresses that were "good" yesterday could be "evil" today. How does the software automatically detect this?

How would holders of Bitcoin know who to trust and who not to trust in real time? How can they tell the difference between a node that has been secretly taken over by a government or some other entity and one that hasn't? What part of the client determines that? Where is the code, in the client, that establishes, in real-time, whether a node is "evil" or not? And then when it does, what does it do about that?

Now, if you are telling me that individuals can simply pick and choose which part of the network they will accept, and which part they won't, well, that's another security risk, now isn't it? :)



Where is the mechanism where end-holders of Bitcoin individually scrutinize nodes and decide, qualitatively, whether they want to accept that node or not? I don't see that anywhere in my wallet software. What am I missing? How would my wallet automatically know what is "good" and what is "evil"? Show me in actual source code, please.

At every turn here you seem to assume that "people" will "decide" what is "right" and "wrong".

There are no people involved in this decision. Bitcoin is an algorithm, not a committee.

"You" are a software developer, trying to introduce backward-incompatible changes, and thinking, that by having 51%, "you" can change the way how existing software works. "You" cannot. Nodes simply won't understand "your" messages, if "you" are going to "ignore the database".

By reading the protocol. If you have "tx" P2P network message, then you can send transactions. In some strictly-defined format. Not just "arbitrary data, no matter what". You have to stick to the protocol messages: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_documentation

If you produce something unusual, it will be instantly rejected, in the same way, as if you speak Quenya, your content will be rejected by English-based community.

For example: we had "checkorder" message, when we had Pay-to-IP features. Now we don't have it. And you can have 99% hashrate, it doesn't matter, by having that, you won't reintroduce Pay-to-IP messages to the protocol, if your peers won't understand it.

By having code, which is responsible for detecting that. If you start broadcasting bad messages to the network, then other nodes will automatically execute "setban" command on your IP, for example up to 24 hours. If you try to execute 600k block reorg, then first, long before that, people will need to download and verify your blocks (and then, they will notice that something is wrong). But even if they don't, then by trying to wiping away 500 GB of history, you will trigger all kinds of protections, related to allowed data transfer in P2P network, so either you stick with the bandwidth, allowed by other nodes (and then it takes time to share those blocks), or you send more than allowed, and other nodes will ban you automatically, or disconnect from you for the next hours, and try other peers automatically.

By playing the game of trust, and sticking to some simple, universal rules: https://ncase.me/trust/

There are many CopyCat nodes, which can win the war in the long term. You can try to introduce some new node type, and compete with CopyCat. If it will be successful, then it may be adopted, and used by the majority of users. But if your node is a Cheat node, producing incompatible messages, then it will quickly lose the game, by being banned by most of the network, and having no peer to connect to, for the next 24 hours.

Nodes are judged by their behaviour. If you send invalid P2P message, you will first receive some kind of warning, then some short ban, and then it can escalate, up to 24h ban. You can test it in regtest on localhost, if you want to know, how exactly debug log file will look like.

See "setban" command, and CTRL+F or grep places in the code, leading to those parts.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/banman.h#L28

Just read "banman.h" and "banman.cpp" files, to find out.

Why? If you connect to your own server, you can trust it. It is your server, your node, the same entity, the same party. You can also trust localhost. There are many things you have to trust, to have some basic computing ability. For example: you have to trust, that your random number generator is "random" enough. If it is not, then all of your private keys could be compromised.

And command-line options like "setban" or "invalidateblock", or even "preciousblock" are there for what? Because developers had nothing better to do with their time?

Obviously, most nodes run on autopilot, for most of the time. But: there are ways to grep debug log, and catch some unexpected behaviour. Even when some mining pool violated sigops limit, it was quickly noticed, and you even had forum topics about it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5447129

See? Some people are reading those logs. And in the Open Source world, it is normal to have some eyes, watching some logs, reading some code, and talking about what they can see, if they observe something unusual.

If the software on the nodes has been changed to accept the messages, then they will accept the messages.


Yes, and obviously nodes who are "evil" will adhere to the protocol...



Correct. And what if this code doesn't detect it? What if the protocol used is (obviously) the exact same one as any other node? What if some nodes say one thing about the disposition of a block and other nodes say something different? What decides which has the correct data and whch does not in real time?


Again, unless the attackers were absolute morons, they wouldn't attack the network this way.



So what is to stop a government or other large entity to infiltrate or otherwise compel a large number of network actors to ban the good nodes and keep the bad ones? Nothing. This is why Bitcoin is not managed by a central committee of people, like you keep implying it is. It's an algorithm, and people are necessarily factored out of the system.

👍

Many plebs like me, and newbies, forget that cryptocurrencies are more than the technical layer. It's actually about the social layer. Visualize a situation when a state-level actor successfully 51% attacked Bitcoin, and the Core developers, the economic majority, and the community in general had consensus to fork Bitcoin making the other side of the fork a centralized Govcoin network. Haha.

Plus what would probably happen is those bad actors that attacked the network will probably come back and mine honestly to earn Bitcoin.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yes, it is. Likelihood is another question. Right now I'd say the likelihood is not that high, mining is still quite distributed and in addition to that, miners being influenced by government or collectively acting for a country/government is also another topic. In a future where one country dominates all of the resources, controls all of the companies within it/all companies are complicit to the demand of its government, and where other countries have either given up on Bitcoin mining, or simply no longer have resources to compete, that likelihood dramatically increases. Are we headed there? Not an impossibility. Is it happening now? Too hard to say. It'd be quite pessimistic to say that's where we're headed, and that we'll get there with no resistance.

It depends, if intent is malicious, they could destroy the whole Bitcoin network by compromising the integrity of the blockchain. The moment the blockchain is modified by a 51% attack, in my opinion, it's valueless. Again, likelihood and actual possibility is something to consider in this topic.


That's a bit hard to say. If the rest of the world has dropped it anyway, or there is another alternative, maybe there would be no major implication? Bitcoin becomes valueless, the world moves onto an alternative, and moves on? Maybe a short period of disarray or chaos if Bitcoin is relied upon in some major way and a viable alternative is not yet existent? This would be a controversial opinion, others might argue the end of cryptocurrency as the largest & most supported has fallen. It's an interesting topic.



This is even more interesting of a topic. I'd be curious to see if this would compromise the integrity of the entire space or if it would be a temporary transitional period to the next best alternative, as mentioned earlier in the post. I think this also depends on when this happens. Right now, Bitcoin is the most mature chain, if it were to happen today it might have a massive effect that takes a long time to recover from. If it happens in 10, 20 or 30 years, it might be as simple as using the next best thing (or a better thing, if it presents itself between now and then).


It's a $1.5T asset however it's not a $1.5T risk or exposure that NATO/US. They have bigger agendas and concerns at this point...I'm not informed on the matter, though I'd be surprised if they're thinking this far ahead.

---

Good post and great questions :)

But what does that actually mean? "Ban the good nodes", and cause a fork in the network? Which side of the fork does everyone actually believe that will gain the support of the Core Developers, the Economic Majority, and the community in general? The centralized Govcoin, or Bitcoin?

For me, this topic is really interesting and worth discussing more. The idea that a country, especially China, could control over 50% of Bitcoin's mining power raises important questions. Even though it seems unlikely for a prvate company or small country, China has had a large share of Bitcoin's mining power before, making this possible. If China, or any country, to controlled more than half of the mining power, they could control the software, chenge the blockchain, and cause major problems. This could damage trust in Bitcoin, change how it works fundamentally, and make it follow their rules.

Why exactly do the "Core Developers" matter?

Are the Core Developers the people who... control Bitcoin?

If that were the case, then Bitcoin would absolutely be centralized and any government could control Bitcoin simply by controlling these "Core Developers". These Core Developers could be threatened with jail, for instance, if they didn't change the code to enact changes some new laws demanded.

But that's not the case. Bitcoin is not controlled by a central committee of any kind: it's an algorithm. What controls Bitcoin is the majority of the nodes/hashrate on the network, not any identifiable human beings per se.

What's your point, ser? Currently, as imperfect as they are, they more or less matter like the Economic Majority matters, like the community of ordinary users collectively matters. I don't make the rules, that simply is the current situation. I'm obviously not trying to tell everyone that the Core Developers "control" Bitcoin. Study Gavin Andresen.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Hey folks, so after a lot of (great!) discussion here, I'll try to summarize the key conclusions of this thread:

1. The short answer to the thread's question is yes, China (or similar) could take control of Bitcoin if such an entity were so inclined.

2. It would be done by either compelling through law, or taking over by clandestine means, existing nodes on the network.

3. There are current two centralized, identifiable companies that control over 50% of the Bitcoin hashrate, so an effective takeover of Bitcoin would only require control of two entities, not the "thousands" that many probably think it would require.

4. While it's true that the motivations of such an attack are not readily obvious, I actually don't think we've spent that much time here working through the scenarios, either. Taking over the Bitcoin network would be a "hostage situation" wherein major holders would want, more than anything else, to maintain the value of their holdings.

5. The principle protection against this kind of attack--and indeed, the primary defender of the Bitcoin network--is none other than the United States federal government, without whom Bitcoin would be fodder for every manner of state actors attacking it. The only thing stopping such an attack right now is fear of reprisals from the US and its allies.

China probably could, but it's also probable that they could be kicked out of the network, and the "total damage" they caused in the network is some censored transactions, and a double-spend.

It would be stupid to believe that the Core Developers, the Economic Majority, and the users/community in general would merely follow Govcoin.