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Comment by diegocg | Hacker News Reader

How is this good news?

That the hash rate has fallen so much means that coordinating a 51% attack is perfectly doable. Imagine that the missing hashing power was mining a parallel blockchain right now. We know it's not happening, but this proves that it's much easier to do than expected. These news essentially mean that the claims about bitcoin being completely safe from state attacks are vaporware.

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Bitcoin critics would mention the 51% attack vulnerability and point to the concentration of miners in China. Now that the Chinese mining concentration resolves, it is called bad news for Bitcoin because the hash rate will fall in the short run. But good and bad are on different time scales here.

A bit of news. A chinese citizen doing business else where could still be implored to help China when asked.

Hashpower was concentrated in China. It takes time for the miners to relocate and setup shop, I'd be surprised if the hash power is permanently reduced. I don't think anyone reasonable is claiming that BTC is completely safe against state attackers. That's the mission but nothing is 100% certain.

It’s always trivial to perform a 51% attack by forming a large mining pool. You don’t have to kick people out of China to do that. The only issue is convincing the miners to go against their economic interest.

China could have relatively easily done that previously but now it will probably be difficult for any one country to become that non-economic actor with both control of hash rate and the ability to coerce miners.

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