The Elephant in the Room

[Lunatic_Pandora]

Ok, When will we stop ignoring the elephant in the room? We are seeing many blockchains become centralized, even some of the big ones like BCH, being vulnerable to 51% attacks or accept that 12.5% of the miners' profits are taken away by some unaccountable Chinese fund? Is this something that will become a trend with the other blockchain projects? Is there anything to be done about this?

What're your guys takes on this?

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[siddartha1492]

Not just BCH, but I read that even for BTC more than 50% of hash rate is coming from China. And even though it is very difficult, but being an authoritarian govt. it isn't very difficult for China to take over that 50%+ mining hashrate. So, ya it a real danger.
China has a big advantage of cheap electricity, locations, labour and supply chain. Hard to compete with it. But if you really want to decentralize your blockchains, then I guess you'll have to contribute hashrate from other countries, even it is expensive.

[bgaf]

This is their plan from the very start. We cant stop China feom dominating every business sector out there. I dont know I feel like they really have aim and succesfully invaded the cryptobusiness. They all have the advantages as a big elephant on this business, perhaps this is a major move they anticipate that will happened. Even the corona outbreak makes their force or asset grow. I dont know but chinese projects on crypto space is owned by them. See the number 1 exchange Binance, half chinese, and if you have blood running on your veins, you know you cant say no to your countrymen for help.

BCH move is really agressive and arrogant. I do hope bitconers abandoned this project.

[The1Duke]

Not just BCH, but I read that even for BTC more than 50% of hash rate is coming from China. And even though it is very difficult, but being an authoritarian govt. it isn't very difficult for China to take over that 50%+ mining hashrate. So, ya it a real danger.
China has a big advantage of cheap electricity, locations, labour and supply chain. Hard to compete with it. But if you really want to decentralize your blockchains, then I guess you'll have to contribute hashrate from other countries, even it is expensive.

This is no joke, a couple of years back my government (Venezuela) tried to make a miner registry, and they were seizing miner's equipment to use it themselves. Went as far as to use drones with thermal sensors to check if apartments with high energy consumption were actually being lived in or used as mining farms to raid. Eventually they gave up on it because the registry was unenforceable our government is a joke.
The whole Chinese fund thing is really worrisome too, specially considering that this is supposed to go live this month and there's still no word about it.

[LuciferMorningstar]

Can't help with China's part. There are 1.4 billion Chinese living in China and the Chinese are the most earlier adopters of cryptocurrency. They ought to lead any of the mining with their resource alone even if they are latecomers. Somehow, Chinese like BCH a lot too so BCH is a lost cause if you're keen on the decentralize of cryptocurrency.

[Febo]

Ok, When will we stop ignoring the elephant in the room? We are seeing many blockchains become centralized, even some of the big ones like BCH, being vulnerable to 51% attacks or accept that 12.5% of the miners' profits are taken away by some unaccountable Chinese fund? Is this something that will become a trend with the other blockchain projects? Is there anything to be done about this?

What're your guys takes on this?

All PoW chains that allow ASIC miners are in danger of being 51% attacked. Bigger like Bitcoin of course way harder since more ASIC producers compete. Fro smaller coins one ASIC producer makes much better miner and mine in secrecy with huge advantage. Other miners leave and he can have way more then 50% of hashrate.

In general 51% attacks are way less dangerous that are usually explained in crypto news. It is just a fraud that is illegal everywhere on the world and should simply be prosecuted. Attackers should know that and decide not to even when have a chance fro a fraud.

[Tipstar]

We have options. Specially when it comes to open source blockchain. If you don't agree with someone, you shift your interest or even fork the coin.
Bitcoin in my eyes is still a pretty secure and decentralized blockchain and so is it's popularity, maybe more than 50% of hashrates be coming from China but that doesn't mean it's in danger. Many of chinese miners are as dedicated of securing bitcoin as any of us.

[bitmover]

We are seeing many blockchains become centralized, even some of the big ones like BCH, being vulnerable to 51% attacks or accept that 12.5% of the miners' profits are taken away by some unaccountable Chinese fund?

BCH was never decentralized. It has a CEO who controls it. The same as BSV.

Craig, Roger Ver, etc controls that.
Now Roger Ver is even creating a Tax to himself lol
https://cointelegraph.com/news/major-bitcoin-cash-pools-force-125-mining-tax-on-community

The only true decentralized blockchain is Bitcoin. Mining centralization is indeed a problem with bitcoin ecosystem, but mining is more profitable in china due to energy and hardware costs... But I believe that thigns can get better in the future.

[Ucy]

It seems to me that the community has already accepted that the PoW will be eventually "centralized". This shouldn't have been allowed in the first place if we really understand what the main goals of Bitcoin is. Concentration of mining in few hands, places or countries ultimately defeat the goal. Decentralization and censorship resistant should be improving in the right manner (not moving backwards) on real crypto network

[hatshepsut93]

Alts were always in the risk of centralization even in early days, just because they are tiny compared to Bitcoin, and as years went, it became clear that crypto community doesn't care about decentralization - people are to illiterate to determine if a system is centralized or not, and they are too greedy to bother to learn, they only want to make money with speculation. Nowadays more and more people realize that altcoins are just shitcoins, but they still don't think about decentralization, they only see that alts don't perform well price-wise.

[NeuroticFish]

We are seeing many blockchains become centralized, even some of the big ones like BCH, being vulnerable to 51% attacks or accept that 12.5% of the miners' profits are taken away by some unaccountable Chinese fund?

Some blockchains were not made from start to be (properly) decentralized (or not at all). Not all devs are working for a greater good (BCH and BSV are wonderful examples).
One has to read as much as possible and whenever something stinks just leave that boat.

But yes, it's a real problem and it's not new. In some cases the success of a blockchain (basically the market cap) is not reflected by the strength of the underlying blockchain (difficulty). And if this happens, especially if it lasts too long, somebody will profit by making 51% attack. Creating hype is cheap. Meeting the requirements for the success to last may be much more difficult.


About miners' profits I am not sure I understood. But wherever a businessman can find super cheap electricity, maybe also cheap miner devices, he's start a mining business there. China is such an example and I think that it's not the business men to blame, it's the idiocy (and greed) of western governments which add a ton of fees into electricity price making it unreasonably high.
But this can be beaten with enough funds and future proof thinking. One can build up on renewable energy. This will ensure on long term that one will stay in business, even after many halvings, because after ROI the energy will be almost for free (some maintenance costs remain).

[Darkuso]

I found this project a while ago, and I think their solution is pretty interesting. They have some apps already running on top of their blockchain demonstrate their concept, so it doesn't look like just empty talk; https://org.saito.tech/blockchain-myths-1-someone-will-always-pay-to-run-the-network/

[trevelyan22]

Hey Dark -- thx, Saito is awesome.

Personally, think the BCH problems are being caused by their own devs not the miners. No-one is forcing them to fund themselves out of the block reward - they just view it as free money that no-one will get pissed off about if they seize. The strange thing is the sense that getting majority support from the miners makes it OK for them to undermine the entire point of a cryptocurrency being an open system. Makes the entire system no different than the legacy financial infrastructure.

[Darkuso]

Hey Dark -- thx, Saito is awesome.

Personally, think the BCH problems are being caused by their own devs not the miners. No-one is forcing them to fund themselves out of the block reward - they just view it as free money that no-one will get pissed off about if they seize. The strange thing is the sense that getting majority support from the miners makes it OK for them to undermine the entire point of a cryptocurrency being an open system. Makes the entire system no different than the legacy financial infrastructure.

Yeah, you are totally right, maybe its because your last sentense, "Makes the entire system no different than the legacy financial infrastructure." that system that everybody are used to it allow them to behave like that and do whatever they want, that is the difference when you are only for the "fast internet money". If they are going to treat it like fiat, what's even the point...