Does China Control Bitcoin?

[DigitalCyberius]

Here's an interesting article citing some recent research which claims that the majority of mining power is in China, and those miners may have some perks that others outside the country do not have.

Here's the article.
https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/10/08/china-means-intent-destroy-bitcoin/

It talks about whether China could destroy Bitcoin, or perhaps use it in some other way.

What do you think? Does China control Bitcoin? If so, is it the government or no? Are these Chinese Bitcoin mining farms working together? What might China do with Bitcoin (government or no) in the future? AKA, attempt to destroy Bitcoin (would they be successful, do you think), use it to bring more wealth into the country or personal pockets, use it to attack other nations, etc?

Looking forward to your thoughts,
The Cyberius team. 

[jseverson]

The moment someone manages to take control of Bitcoin, it loses all its value. That takes away the financial motivation of any would-be attackers, and also makes the attack infeasibly expensive.

The Chinese government probably does hold a certain amount of influence considering the hashrate behind their firewall, but miners are wising up by setting up farms elsewhere.

Also:

The paper has yet go through proper peer reviews – so take the conclusions with a grain of salt.

[akram143]

It is just a conspiracy theory so you need to you understand the reality that Bitcoin is not controlled by anyone at least with the current value 51 percentage of attack is not possible and the blockchain network of Bitcoin.

[Oilacris]

Here's an interesting article citing some recent research which claims that the majority of mining power is in China, and those miners may have some perks that others outside the country do not have.

We cant really deny into this fact but doesnt mean that they do have the control over the network they might ave big impact but not totally coming

to a point that it would be monopolized considering that China isnt the only place that do mine. No one control bitcoin and if someone does then its value wont really be the same on what we are seeing now.

[Slow death]

It talks about whether China could destroy Bitcoin, or perhaps use it in some other way.

if that were true, do you think the Chinese government would let bitcoin exist for many years? how many years have miners in china mining bitcoin? probably over 6 years or more years... you do not think that if the Chinese government wanted to hurt bitcoin they would have done it a long time, right at the beginning when few people knew bitcoin? these theory always make me laugh

It is just a conspiracy theory...

We should not pay attention to this.

[bitcoinUF]

Here's an interesting article citing some recent research which claims that the majority of mining power is in China, and those miners may have some perks that others outside the country do not have.

We cant really deny into this fact but doesnt mean that they do have the control over the network they might ave big impact but not totally coming

to a point that it would be monopolized considering that China isnt the only place that do mine. No one control bitcoin and if someone does then its value wont really be the same on what we are seeing now.

This.

Still is good that everybody is aware that the miningpools are not descentralized at all, most of them are control by the same entities and it could be a problem in the long run.

[vixcious]

I don't think they will destroy Bitcoin, they will take advantage of it to develop for the more prosperous country. You can see, on the economic front, it is now completely suppressed by the US and everything seems to be too difficult for the government and the people.
Therefore, the crypto decentralized market seems to be quite risky but if they get more and more BTC, they will be one of the market controllers and get the most profit for dump and pump.
not only China wants to own a lot of Bitcoin, it is also in many other countries.

[AjithBtc]

It was true China having the majority of the mining power even after several issues that has arisen recently regarding the ban of bitcoin mining. Once China has got the increased number of users, but later due to some economic downfall they believed it is the bitcoin that is causing the economic collapse and began to restrict the use. Further citing the environmental pollution mining is restricted. If China hasn't contributed good during its early days bitcoin could've never grown this high.

[Kemarit]

Chinese mining pools still control at least 70% of the Bitcoin hashrate.  They still have the biggest Bitcoin pools over the last couple of years, so we can say that they are in control. However, I don't think that they are stupid enough to destroy Bitcoin. Even though there are reports that they government is cracking down or have thoughts of shutting down Bitcoin mining farms because it is hazardous to their environment. I doubt that they destroying it has cross their mind, so this is just probably a hearsay.

[fiulpro]

Well illegally yes
Legally no

And the government has already banned all this and therefore it is something that is not being controlled by a single authority or the government itself .

So you cannot expect all of them to make a move to destroy the Bitcoins market, because they are just scattered business man doing their work hidden from the government thus you should be sure of a fact that they are not controlling it nor they are in a control of anything that might think bad for the market , the miners would love to see it flourishing therefore they won't actually break it.

[Oceat]

Well illegally yes
Legally no

And the government has already banned all this and therefore it is something that is not being controlled by a single authority or the government itself .

So you cannot expect all of them to make a move to destroy the Bitcoins market, because they are just scattered business man doing their work hidden from the government thus you should be sure of a fact that they are not controlling it nor they are in a control of anything that might think bad for the market , the miners would love to see it flourishing therefore they won't actually break it.

No one can control Bitcoin, no single entity or person can control it since it is a decentralized digital currency.

China is not controlling anything here except for its large mining pool which is one of the reasons why Bitcoin price grows so much before.

[Averim]

If i remember right wasn't there some regulations against crypto in China?

[Chrystora123]

China does not control Bitcoin, but most Bitcoin investors come from China so they indirectly control Bitcoin. I've been paying attention to the country that adheres to the communist system, how does the government direct its citizens to invest in precious metals and not in cryptocurrency.

[Stedsm]

Chinese mining pools still control at least 70% of the Bitcoin hashrate.  They still have the biggest Bitcoin pools over the last couple of years, so we can say that they are in control.

I believe you're being mistaken here as I can agree with "they control the mining pools" but the fact is not true if you say that they are in control of BTC too because many investors of different countries have bagged themselves great chunks of BTC during its doom and these countries have got very high % in terms of holding BTC against China alone and I believe Japan gives a fair competition to China in same regards.

However, I don't think that they are stupid enough to destroy Bitcoin. Even though there are reports that they government is cracking down or have thoughts of shutting down Bitcoin mining farms because it is hazardous to their environment. I doubt that they destroying it has cross their mind, so this is just probably a hearsay.

None of them gives a damn to environment or any such thing when it comes to making money over it and they've got many sophisticated ways to mine BTC by powering their miners through solar energy. None of us would think about destroying BTC if we are a country because it helps aid many financial issues (not at a country level but) in people's lives generally and it is making a lot of difference to them while also teaching them the importance of BTC as an asset and cryptonomics.

[NathanJB]

The truth is that Bitcoin controls china.

It may look the other way around though. It is because the government of china is the one that issues regulations and policies. Unfortunately, they do not like Bitcoin and eventually issued a restriction.

But then, here's the catch, do the chinese follow the government? No. Do they continue buying and selling Bitcoin? Yes. Which is more powerful then, Bitcoin or the government? Who is in control then?

[abeecrypto]

Eerm! One can't say China controls Bitcoin. Bitcoin, through the Blockchain technology isn’t built to entertain that. However, one can say China has delved a lot into major technologies in the world, including Blockchain technology.

China might have majority of miners but I don not think they have up to 51% of miners in the world. More miners will keep coming from other countries.

Plus, I don’t think one country will control bitcoin in the future. As more people in other countries get aware of Bitcoin, more miners will pop out from those countries, thereby leading to further distribution of miners around the world.

[beerlover]

That will not be going too long because China officially banned mining and most of the huge whale miners already moved to other countries anyway so they will not be controlling the price for too long however the point of miners deciding on bitcoin price still stands because they are the ones that is making money from the new coins plus the transaction fee's which in return they sell and drop the price or at least keep the price lower, if they were to keep those coins and not sell them then we would be in a huge bull run where people would only buy and these millions of dollars wouldn't be sold on market every single day.

It doesn't matter if China controls it or someone else does as a nation, it matters how much miners can affect the price and we should look for a way to slow that down, if miners do not sell too much then we can make more profits.

[FrozenBit]

Having many mining businesses does not mean that Chinese people hold a lot of Bitcoin. Miners can dig bitcoin and sell them for monthly profits and new Bitcoin collectors are market drivers.
In China, they often do not want to hold much Bitcoin because their government disagrees with crypto trading and very high taxation.

[omonuyak]

Bitcoin is decentralized and I don't think one country including China has control over it. We have a mining farm everywhere and it might just be that China has the largest farm and I don't think there control the whole thing. In my country, we have Bitcoin miners likewise other country and I don't think a single country can destroy bitcoin because it is decentralized.

[eaLiTy]

Here's an interesting article citing some recent research which claims that the majority of mining power is in China, and those miners may have some perks that others outside the country do not have.

Have you checked the date in which the article is published, coming up with an article that is published in October 2018 and having a debate is a bit cheesy as there were many topics here that talked about it in this forum, since you started this topic here is my opinion regarding it, the Chinese government usually likes to have a control on everything which includes foreign investment in the form of a company and they have being doing that for years and the recent Huawei issue with the US government all stemmed up from that, but to control a decentralized platform is an impossible task and they do not have any control over bitcoin.