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Comment by hammyhavoc | Hacker News Reader

Last time I checked, blocking ports, domains, IP ranges, et al was trivial in China.

A ban doesn't mean that something stops, a ban means that it becomes extremely difficult, a punishable crime, and the risk-to-reward ratio becomes significantly diminished.

Likewise, the inverse is also true. CB radio was illegal in the UK, but it was hugely popular, then, overnight, upon it being made legal, it died. Most people lost interest because it was no longer exciting. You see the same thing with legalizing cannabis. Sure, you'll get hardcore consumers and enthusiasts, and people using it for medical reasons, but it's no longer cool/edgy/interesting, and when it is so accessible.

Could really go either way, but when it comes to money, people don't tend to fuck around.

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If you think crypto is gone from China, I tihnk you may be mistaken.

Argentina isn't the US or UK. There was a video an Argentinian pointed out to me of a vendor selling black-market goods right in front of the tax office. No one gives a fuck. Violating Argentina's insane tax code is sport for their populace. Once you become big enough corruption and ol boy network with the tax authorities will negotiate what percent of your income you lie about, usually you keep like 70% off the books by the account of one accountant from a large construction company I interacted with.

I never said it was gone. Did you read the comment properly?

"A ban doesn't mean that something stops, a ban means that it becomes extremely difficult, a punishable crime, and the risk-to-reward ratio becomes significantly diminished."

I think I was crystal clear.

Ok glad you agree it can't be stopped.

It definitely is not extremely difficult. Even tangible stuff like pot that doesn't have nearly the value density (you can fit billions of USD crypto on a wallet stored on memory smaller than 1/8th bag of pot) was extraordinarily easy to obtain for me as a kid in a place where it was illegal both by state and federal government's law. And there's no drug dog to sniff it out.

A chinese citizen could laughably easily obtain crypto.

Packet sniffing is absolutely a thing that cryptocurrency is susceptible to, and can be automated. https://exploitbyte.com/sniffing-cryptocurrency-traffic/

I'm no security expert but I'm nearly certain that is defeated by using a VPN or tor or some other way of obfuscating your traffic.

Sure, but this all starts to become far too complex for the average citizen. The average citizen that just about managed to wrap their brain around crypto in a semi-OK UX is going to get caught out.

I know ex-military folks that can survive in the wilderness just fine, but your average person wouldn't, and this is about the 99%, not the 1%.

What next? The phones available in the country have a specific ROM that doesn't offer VPNs? Already happening. Not even accounting for leaks in VPNs, and whether someone can trust a VPN provider. We already know that the major providers sell netflow data.

The average citizen doesn't know wilderness survival because they don't need it to survive and thrive. Throw a dumb 18 year old into the army and they will probably learn it just fine.

Learning to read takes way more time and energy than learning to use crypto behind a VPN, but we do it in part because it makes us successful. Basically every child learns this complex task. It actually turns out that just spending time to practice a procedural task is a perfect substitute for intelligence, for many many tasks. I think obfuscating traffic is one of those where maybe some people will take a lot longer than others but almost everyone could learn. If VPN or tor becomes a critical component to someones livelihood they will learn to do it or someone will profit from dumbing it down enough that they're able to.

Yeah, crypto is still China's best way of exporting coal through the atmosphere.

This comment packs a surprising number of misunderstandings into a single short sentence.

China outlawed crypto mining early last year, resulting in a two-thirds drop in the hashrate within a month. Even then, the order of magnitude was wrong for it to be "the best way of exporting coal," which by the way China is a large net importer of; https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index estimates the whole Bitcoin network at 14 GW, but China's electrical production averages 850 GW, and overall energy consumption is some 4500 GW, 2500 of which is still coal.

So, at best, China could only have been exporting about 1% of its coal consumption in the form of Bitcoin (though in fact much of its Bitcoin mining was renewables-powered), and now it has mostly stopped doing even that.

Much of the drop in the hashrate was picked up by Kazakhstan, which has an all-coal power grid.

No, according to https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57811959, only about 7% of the hashrate moved to Kazakhstan (probably about 1 GW), which (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Kazakhstan#Electrici...) only has about 10 GW of total electrical generation (out of 20 GW capacity). Coal just isn't competitive for bitcoin mining unless you can get someone else to pay for it, even when the plant is already built, so Bitcoin miners are in no position to fund the expansion of Kazakhstan's coal-burning generation network.

The hashrate fell 53%, hitting bottom in July, didn't finish recovering until December, and still isn't consistently above its pre-prohibition peak, so "much of the drop in the hashrate" wasn't picked up by anybody.

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