Would you consider this as a possible threat to Bitcoin?

[Kprawn]

We already know the Chinese miners have a advantage over other miners in the world, namely cheaper electricity.

We also know that the halving will happen in 2016 and most miners will struggle to make a profit and they will quit mining, if the price of Bitcoin do not increase with the halving.

The only people who might still make a profit, will be the people with the cheap electricity or those who has some sort of edge over the rest.

This already happened when ASIC's were introduced, and most CPU/GPU solo miners left the mining scene, because they could not stay profitable and compete with the people

who used the ASIC's.

Let's say this does happen, and we are left with one nation or geographical area dominating the mining scene, will this not be seen as centralization and a possible weak point?

Another scenario could be, where say Finland create some sort of new ASIC chip or new technology that is capable of doing much more calculations and they then decide not

to export it to other nations and just dominate the mining scene. The difficulty would increase and the people with the old technology will be pushed out of mining in theory.

Do you perceive this as a possible threat? Or just the natural evolution of Bitcoin?   

[Amph]

in theory the 4 years waiting between the halving, should be enough to encourage the price to increase and accomodate the profit needed by the miners to stay in the game

if this is not true, we all know how bad this will end, however many miners around 0.05 electricity will remain in the scene even with the next halving

but if by the 2020 halving, we are still in this same situation, no miners/farm will be able to gain profit, and bitcoin will be doomed to die

also it does not really matter where farms are located as long as they mine on different pool and all the equipment do not belongs to a single entity

[Kprawn]

good question... you laid out the facts nicely, but what you are trying to describe/define is subjective:

i.e.  what constitutes a threat toward our decentralization (without exactly defining our "decentralization" characteristic)

you need to quantify your question (make it objective), by asking something along the well defined lines of:

"what are the chances of a double spend occurring from a rogue group of Chinese miners"

Only then can you critically make comparisons of possible outcomes, and then compare them to your definition of "decentralization" that you described above (when you do).

To answer your question, you need to consider if the Chinese miners have an incentive to steal a couple transactions and risk killing their golden goose.  The existential threat is of course from the mother, and not the miners.

Satoshi's persoective, if you look back at his postings, predicts a certain degree of natural re-centralization as bitcoin evolved

Agreed, but my angle is not really the threat associated with a double spend, but the establishment of a central point of failure. Instability in one geographical area, could become

a threat for the whole network.

Let's say all mining is centralized in one area and a war break out, or some sort of political decision is made to stop Bitcoin mining or a natural disaster happen in that area and the

network hash power gets crushed. Hope you see what I am seeing... 

[Mickeyb]

in theory the 4 years waiting between the halving, should be enough to encourage the price to increase and accomodate the profit needed by the miners to stay in the game

if this is not true, we all know how bad this will end, however many miners around 0.05 electricity will remain in the scene even with the next halving

but if buy the 2020 halving we are still in this same situation, no miners/farm will be able to gain profit, and bitcoin will be doomed to die

also it does not really matter where farms are located as long as they mine on different pool and all the equipment do not belongs to a single entity

Exactly this. We will be OK for the next halving. We have enormous amount of the hashrate at the moment. Even if some miners turn off their rigs because of the unprofitability after the halving of the 2016 we will still be fine.

Also, we are counting for a price increase before the next halving. This should happen and shouldn't be forgotten. This will leave more miners in the game.

[Lauda]

Well, I wouldn't necessarily consider it one of the top priorities as far as threats come. We already have a certain level of centralization when it comes to both nodes and mining. I would not say that it is at a critical stage yet. I do not think that it is going to be come a much bigger problem soon either. This is why the whole block size debate is very important and some are refusing to increase the block size a lot or at all.

[mindrust]

OP is definitely right.

That is why bitcoin will become weaker and cheaper in the next year.

Bitcoin was popular because its price was constantly rising, but now it stays same or rather it falls down.

[coinplus]

OP is definitely right.

That is why bitcoin will become weaker and cheaper in the next year.

Bitcoin was popular because its price was constantly rising, but now it stays same or rather it falls down.

When more miners come in due to cheaper electricity, then the difficulty will raise automatically. People will find buying is better than mining. They would buy bitcoin, that may lead a price hike. Again new miners will come to action due to profitable mining just because of new price hike. Process goes on. Any way only good sign for bitcoin.

[unamis76]

GPU miners eventually moved to ASIC's... Mining centralization on Chinese lands is a bit of "a knife with two edges" topic. They might some day even have the majority of the hashrate, but what would cost them more? Control Bitcoin in the direction they want or keep it going as it is, a network free for all to use? They have a lot to lose if they try to make double spends or "hijack" Bitcoin in some way. They risk being left alone on their own Bitcoin fork, or something like that, which would definitely not be beneficial to them.

As for the second scenario, if a chip maker restricted exports, someone locally would buy the chips and export them for huge profit. So I don't see that as being a possibility.

Difficulty will rise and decrease, and many people will be pushed in and out of mining. That's how it's been so far and I don't really see it changing.

What worries me is indeed a war or a natural disaster, as the OP refers to... What if a big portion of the network has to suddenly shutdown their facilities and move their miners? Will the network be strong enough in the meantime to avoid attacks? Will we have 10 minute blocks? I hope one day the blockchain gets so much hash that one big facility shutting down won't bother anyone or anything (maybe we're already on that point, who knows...)

[koinsuka]

I think this is not a threat to the existence of bitcoin
bitcoin because someday surely will lack when it
continues to be mined and the price will improve again

[QuestionAuthority]

What do you have against the Chinese? I live in China (sort of) and I trust them more than I trust the westerners.

[biggus dickus]

..........

What worries me is indeed a war or a natural disaster, as the OP refers to... What if a big portion of the network has to suddenly shutdown their facilities and move their miners? Will the network be strong enough in the meantime to avoid attacks? Will we have 10 minute blocks? I hope one day the blockchain gets so much hash that one big facility shutting down won't bother anyone or anything (maybe we're already on that point, who knows...)

The possibility of war scares me the most because internet links between countries may get severed for years and years. If there was no way for east and west to communicate then Bitcoin could fork, with the west mining one fork and the east mining another. After a peace agreement which fork would be the real Bitcoin? It could get even messier if there were five forks in five different countries that eventually agreed to reconnect their internet links with each other.

[QuestionAuthority]

..........

What worries me is indeed a war or a natural disaster, as the OP refers to... What if a big portion of the network has to suddenly shutdown their facilities and move their miners? Will the network be strong enough in the meantime to avoid attacks? Will we have 10 minute blocks? I hope one day the blockchain gets so much hash that one big facility shutting down won't bother anyone or anything (maybe we're already on that point, who knows...)

The possibility of war scares me the most because internet links between countries may get severed for years and years. If there was no way for east and west to communicate then Bitcoin could fork, with the west mining one fork and the east mining another. After a peace agreement which fork would be the real Bitcoin? It could get even messier if there were five forks in five different countries that eventually agreed to reconnect their internet links with each other.

If there was a world war large enough to take down global internet connections somehow I don't believe your biggest concern will be forking Bitcoin.

[dothebeats]

What do you have against the Chinese? I live in China (sort of) and I trust them more than I trust the westerners.

Not exactly against China, but the fact that most of the hashrate of the whole network is distributed among the Chinese people. OP is thinking of this as some sort of centralization, which might be the case if more and more people left due to price stagnation together with the upcoming block reward halving. We all know that most parts of China have cheap electricity, and also mining farms are strategically placed on areas which can help cool the mining equipment without having to rely with additional power. With that said, the big mining farms in China is likely to stay in the mining scene due to their profitability, whereas other farms which can't keep up with the cost is likely to leave.

[QuestionAuthority]

What do you have against the Chinese? I live in China (sort of) and I trust them more than I trust the westerners.

Not exactly against China, but the fact that most of the hashrate of the whole network is distributed among the Chinese people. OP is thinking of this as some sort of centralization, which might be the case if more and more people left due to price stagnation together with the upcoming block reward halving. We all know that most parts of China have cheap electricity, and also mining farms are strategically placed on areas which can help cool the mining equipment without having to rely with additional power. With that said, the big mining farms in China is likely to stay in the mining scene due to their profitability, whereas other farms which can't keep up with the cost is likely to leave.

There are other large farms in the world. Last I heard, BitFury has data centers in Finland and Iceland. China may have the largest concentration of farms but they're not the only ones. The only place in the world server farms should not exist is in the totalitarian states of america. The Chinese businessmen would never allow a fork to happen because that would separate them from their profit. If the Chinese government were to ever come down on Bitcoin, watch how fast that equipment relocates to another part of the world. Much ado about nothing.

[eyeknock]

in theory the 4 years waiting between the halving, should be enough to encourage the price to increase and accomodate the profit needed by the miners to stay in the game

everybody can see that this happend all the time ( or at least most of the time ) at the ALT scene, when a coin in near a halving like LTC with his last halving for example, the price always grow up, so me "theory" is that yes, the price will grow up and i agree with you.

Also, we are counting for a price increase before the next halving. This should happen and shouldn't be forgotten. This will leave more miners in the game.

thats the main reason i said that it will  continue with good health

[gogxmagog]

I'm more worried what will happen to the price of electricity.

[n2004al]

We already know the Chinese miners have a advantage over other miners in the world, namely cheaper electricity.

We also know that the halving will happen in 2016 and most miners will struggle to make a profit and they will quit mining, if the price of Bitcoin do not increase with the halving.

The only people who might still make a profit, will be the people with the cheap electricity or those who has some sort of edge over the rest.

This already happened when ASIC's were introduced, and most CPU/GPU solo miners left the mining scene, because they could not stay profitable and compete with the people

who used the ASIC's.

Let's say this does happen, and we are left with one nation or geographical area dominating the mining scene, will this not be seen as centralization and a possible weak point?

Another scenario could be, where say Finland create some sort of new ASIC chip or new technology that is capable of doing much more calculations and they then decide not

to export it to other nations and just dominate the mining scene. The difficulty would increase and the people with the old technology will be pushed out of mining in theory.

Do you perceive this as a possible threat? Or just the natural evolution of Bitcoin?   

According to me this scenarios are a good imagination but nothing else.

First scenario that suppose that Chinese can dominate the scene of mining cannot be known because the technology can invent things (minings hardware) that can overcome the cheap electricity of the firsts. So the other miners will not go out of mining. This is most probable to be true according to me than your first supposition.

The same with the second scenario. Why must be only Finland that will create this hardware? Have no arguments about this. There are to many the businesses which produce hardware for mining and are no reason's that those cannot invent mining hardware less good than Finland.

So, as a conclusion your fear, I think, it is without bases and you must remain sure that no one of your supposed things cannot happen. 

[dothebeats]

What do you have against the Chinese? I live in China (sort of) and I trust them more than I trust the westerners.

Not exactly against China, but the fact that most of the hashrate of the whole network is distributed among the Chinese people. OP is thinking of this as some sort of centralization, which might be the case if more and more people left due to price stagnation together with the upcoming block reward halving. We all know that most parts of China have cheap electricity, and also mining farms are strategically placed on areas which can help cool the mining equipment without having to rely with additional power. With that said, the big mining farms in China is likely to stay in the mining scene due to their profitability, whereas other farms which can't keep up with the cost is likely to leave.

There are other large farms in the world. Last I heard, BitFury has data centers in Finland and Iceland. China may have the largest concentration of farms but they're not the only ones. The only place in the world server farms should not exist is in the totalitarian states of america. The Chinese businessmen would never allow a fork to happen because that would separate them from their profit. If the Chinese government were to ever come down on Bitcoin, watch how fast that equipment relocates to another part of the world. Much ado about nothing.

There are farms in Iceland and Finland too, also strategic locations in which electricity costs can be cut down due to the natural cooling already available on those areas. China has the most number of farms, I think, and the largest pool in the world is located there too, so that adds up to the centralization factor in terms of mining. China has the edge to mine and hash with profit even if other farms leave the mining scene.

The only place in the world server farms should not exist is in the totalitarian states of america.

I couldn't agree more on this particular line.

[franky1]

natural evolution of bitcoin

[neurotypical]

This:
The only people who might still make a profit, will be the people with the cheap electricity or those who has some sort of edge over the rest.
Will still be the case in the future. It's basically the fundamental premise to make profits with mining... good price of electricity (cheap) and competitive hashrate. If there is some kind of technical leap the market will adapt, but it should follow moore's law anyway so I dont see any catastrophic scenareos with this.