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Comment by pvarangot | Hacker News Reader

> Note that China already controls ~65% of Bitcoin hash rate, so if they wanted to execute this right now, they probably could.

When you say "China" do you mean like an actor that can make coordinated decisions? Or just a geographic region? I'm asking out of curiosity because yeah there's a lot of miners in China across many geographic regions but I never saw any evidence that they even talking to each other, even less coordinated enough to agree on making a decision as drastic at attacking the Bitcoin blockchain.

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I'd make a wild guess that when parent is talking about 'control', they mean that if a miner is located within China, the Chinese government has the ability to put a gun to that miners head and tell them what to do.

"The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away".

Neither mining pools (who practically have the actual power over transaction inclusion an ordering) nor the miners are cooperating. I'm also certain the CCP wouldn't be practically able to locate and control all of them that easily.

The emperor is only a few tens of milliseconds away, no matter where you are in China.

All the small dams or whatever power generator they are using are state owned property, hell even all the available internet access, and since they are the biggest supplier of money laundering vehicles and aids the capital outflow that the party hates to the bone, you better assume that they all have tabs being kept on already.

I'd assume their intelligence services are identifying miners now while the miners don't have incentive to hide. If China wanted to strike at bitcoin they could do it in one fell swoop.

Even in Western countries, if draconian anti-cryptocurrency laws were passed and even slightly enforced, it would kill, or at least force into regulation, large-scale mining operations.

Hypothetically how long would it take the country that produces most of the computing hardware in the world to simply direct all their factories to build mining ASICs as quickly as possible while not exporting any more GPUs? Of course everyone would know what comes next but I am just curious.

With that kind of control, they could just put a gun to anyone's head and ask them to start mining bitcoin and do it the way they want them to. It wouldn't have to depend on how many bitcoin miners are in China at the moment.

It's a lot easier to point a gun to someone's head and say "Switch your equipment over to the network pipe that we give you" rather than point a gun to someone's head and say "Build a datacenter, secure an extremely large source of power, buy a few thousand Bitcoin mining boards, hook them all up in this extremely technical way, and then switch it over to the network pipe we give you."

The gun in the head strategy works best when you're only asking your populace to do simple things. For complex, technical tasks, the usual response is "Oops, I can't concentrate while you've got a gun against my head", and then you can shoot them but that's not going to help your task get accomplished any quicker. (This is also why working conditions at say Google or Apple tend to be pretty good, and why Soviet scientists were treated relatively well even if the rest of the population wasn't.)

Relatively well is, well, relative :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharashka

I'd wager the way China would exert control on miners there would be to regulate their access to electricity.

And exert that control in subtle ways. "We know you, we watch you. You can do what you are doing because we permit it. When we come asking for a favor you won't think twice"

Even easier to put a backdoor on the newer miner boards.

You can't just ask a random person to mine Bitcoin (well you can't, it just won't do much). It needs to be someone who has the mining hardware. So how many miners there are (specifically, how much mining hardware there is) matters.

Fortunately, it is immensely more difficult for the Chinese state to exercise its monopoly on force outside of Chinese borders.

The implication, that no other nation-state may use force to assert control of a strategic economic resource, is in contradiction with both history and common sense.

GP is ipso facto calling out lazy casual racism, but framed constructively because they’re better at it than me.

Casual racism?

The Chinese government has 100% power to do whatever they want. If they want to kill you on an invented charge and send the bill for the bullets to your parents, they can do so (and have done so).

Yes Western governments can use force to intervene with private companies and have done so in the past, but it's unusual for them to do that because people and companies have rights and they can contest the action in court. That's nothing compared to what China can do with no recourse, see Alibaba or the Canadian Michael's for a recent example.

You cannot pretend that the two are similar situations, and doing so is whataboutism. It has nothing to do with race and everything to do with the difference between a free country and a totalitarian country.

The Chinese government is not China any more than the US government is America or the Kremlin is Russia.

Having a go at authoritarian demagoguery and secret police is one thing, have at it.

But doubling down on the casual false equivalence between a people, a country, a government, and a person, just reinforces the point.

Oh, and when you find a free country, do let me know. I haven’t seen one yet. So far, from Australia to Zimbabwe, all governments coerce and murder their citizens.

The OP was not taking about the Chinese people, he was taking about China the Chinese government. It was very clear to me reading that, I'm not sure why you're all confused.

The difficulty with this alleged "clarity" is there is no single entity called "the Chinese government" either.

See also:

Using "China" but assuming .hk and .mo are included

Using "China" but assuming .hk and .mo are excluded

Using "China" to mean the area administered by the ROC

Using "China" to mean the area administered by the PRC

Using "China" to mean the area claimed by the ROC

Using "China" to mean the area claimed by the PRC

Using "China" to mean any area historically associated with the rule or influence of the Xia, Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han, Xin, Wei, Shu, Wu, Jin (1st/2nd), Sui, Tang, Wu Zhou, Liao, Song, Yuan, Ming, or Qing dynasties and their associated interregna and feudal periods.

Using "Chinese government" to mean the CCP, but not the State Council, the NPC, or the PLA

Using "Chinese government" to mean the CCP, the State Council, the NPC, and the PLA

Using "Chinese government" to mean Xi Jinping.

Using "Chinese government" to mean the KMT or DPP.

Using "Chinese government" to mean any and all the above, except the KMT, DPP, or PFP.

Using "mainland China" to try to be more specific (it still isn't, and now you've started a war)

Using "Greater China" to name your regional offices. Looking at you, Apple. (no such thing, it's a western fabrication, like General Zuo's chicken)

Referring to the Chinese language (which one?)

Referring to Chinese characters (hanzi? kanji? jiantizi? hanja??)

Referring to "Chinese food" (this is like categorizing haggis with paella)

Referring to "Chinese people" as though it's one ethnic group

Calling anyone who you think looks Chinese, Chinese.

The wumao and supporters of the CCP have been pushing this racism nonsense for a while now to try to divert criticism against the CCP. It’s unfortunately very common.

Calling out casual bigotry does not equate to sticking up for dictators.

On the other hand, calling racism "nonsense", in any context, that's some Oswald Mosley shit.

I have seen people doing this and it's deeply annoying to reframe criticism of the CCP as racism. Not everything is about race. I'm deeply annoyed by how much race is becoming a thing in general - that seems like it's going to end up being counterproductive to ending racism. I'm not going to go so far as to say it's purposeful by the CCP. But it could be.

Too often it seems like the more precision matters, the easier it is to choose the wrong word.

In this context IMHO the choice of words matters quite a bit. I do my best to never write “China” if I’m in fact referring to the entity commonly identified as “CCP”.

(I understood OP’s point though, probably because I used to make the same mistake—perhaps still inadvertently do with some other countries.)

It is no better an assumption than assuming the OP is a man.

Again with the false equivalence. You're just doubling down on being wrong. I'm out of this conversation.

I’m doubling down on identifying the fundamental category error of all casual bigotry, so this was a useful and interesting conversation for me.

New Zealand? Denmark?

Uh, no, other countries don’t have 65% of the hashing capacity. The USA could put a gun to miners heads, but it wouldn’t give them 51%, so there’s no point.

For all we know, the NSA has a ton of secret miners it could switch on suddenly to launch a 51% attack. Prove me wrong .

(ok this is the stuff of conspiracy theories but it's still a possibility, isn't it?)

Well I guess the question is, if the US govt (or any other superpower) felt it was in their interest to take over / destroy the blockchain, would they be able to?

It seems to me if Bitcoin got to be of huge strategic importance to global finance, countries like the US would start to build out that power. The idea that the economy of say the US was at the mercy of other foreign governments would probably not sit well.

This applies to all large powers just using the US as an example.

Uh-huh. The agencies of, let’s say, the US federal government, or the Kremlin, or similarly those of governments in the UK, France, Germany, all have no history of overseas intervention or onshore direct action to preserve economic interests. Got it.

if 51% of hash power were located in the US, the statement would have been about the US. it is not something special about china that makes this the case, only the fact that it is a sovereign state with the means and will to control activity in its territory, just like every other functioning state. one could also make the case that china might be more likely to intervene in such a way in the economic affairs of its subjects than a liberal democracy, but that is a secondary argument.

No, China is not a person with a single will. The assumption/assertion that the mining equipment may as well all be sitting under MSS guard in Beijing is horsecrap.

It does have a person that can enforce his single will pretty well, though.

In any case, you can follow it like this:

* Nations desire to control strategic resources

* Bitcoin is one such strategic resource

* To control Bitcoin, you need more than 50% of the network

* China has 65% of the network

* China can control Bitcoin

For small scale miners in China it might be a different story.

However, if Xi Jinping decided to crush Bitcoin for whatever reason large scale mining in China, which is well past 50%, would quickly do what he wanted. As such he has de facto control over Bitcoin, though I personally doubt it’s something he would do.

why do you expect that? you're talking about tens of thousands of individuals and companies, all themselves invested in bitcoin, being asked (through no existing command or enforcement mechanism) to essentially destroy their own personal wealth. even assuming the chinese state could achieve compliance from 77% of the existing hardware, it would optimistically take several days. the only way around that stumbling block would be to mandate centralized control of the miners, which would be impossible to keep secret and would also inspire some sort of reaction.

the idea that every miner in china will jump when xi says is pure fantasy.

Remember, China is a country with concentration camps, so they (the CCP) clearly have the ability and desire to do extreme things and convince their people it's the right thing or that it's not happening.

and america has the largest prison population in the world. we still have plenty of people that don't immediately comply with whatever the president says at any moment.

yall act like china is populated entirely by robots. it's a complex society just like anywhere else.

If the US sends an army to China in order to seize their mining rigs, then Bitcoin is the least of our problems.

China would benefit more by confiscating all hashrate & hoarding all of the BTC for themselves before announcing that BTC is their national currency and driving BTC price to millions per-coin.

It's just as farfetched and unlikely, but anti-Bitcoiners just keep theorizing about a hostile China takeover crashing BTC price as if it's feasible, without considering the inverse.

Because China has already announced DCEP as their national crypto. So the chance of them making btc their currency is basically none while China has already cracked down on btc in various ways in the past. They could in theory use btc as some kind of reserve or exchange currency, but not sure why they would need to when everyone has to bend to their will to trade with them.

The rest of the world can just use a forked BTC, then. (Or use one of the already established alternatives.)

No need to bother with a gun. Just threaten to take 100 points off their social credit score or ban them from WeChat.

That's not how China works.

I think the concern is that the authoritarian Chinese government can exercise an awful lot of influence when they are inclined. For a supposedly decentralized system it's an awfully big risk.

The question is whether CCP has sufficient control over them. If it does not yet, it might consider working on that. OTOH I like the game-theoretic argument: they don't need to.

A better question to ask is: 'is the effort worth the gain?'

Is the theater of starting the process worth the concessions I can win?

It's not bluffing if you're willing to do it. But it's a lot cheaper if you don't have to follow through.

China is scary because of the big risks they're willing to take. Like giant earthquakes or drowning Shanghai if their hydro power system has the failure that western civil engineers have predicted.

We are talking about China. There is a supreme actor who gets to make coordinated decisions if they so choose.

Same thing that a lot Chinese people thinking of the West. Like anything is coordinated behind thing, led by US, and followed up by the developed countries.

Thanks for calling out this mental bias.

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