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Comment by jdrc | Hacker News Reader

bitcoin is going to be tricky. unless most miners are in russia they can be convinced to fork chains

1. Russia has been building up gold reserves, not crypo reserves

2. It's actually much harder than convincing 51% of miners that Russia is bad. You'll need to get them to agree on a list of addresses to freeze/sanction. Given that bitcoin addresses are pseudonymous, I'd imagine on agreeing on such a list would be politically impossible. Not to mention, how such action would affect trust in the network and the value of bitcoin

I doubt the majority of bitcoin miners live in places that care about the western neoliberal agenda.

I doubt they much care about neoliberal agenda in first place. It is all about profit. Or being outside that system.

There's plenty of services which map Bitcoin addresses to real-world entities, e.g. Chainalysis Reactor, so coming up with a list of addresses to freeze/sanction would be the easy part.

>coming up with a list of addresses to freeze/sanction would be the easy part.

Coming up with a list of suspects is easy, convincing others that they're totally guilty is the hard part. I doubt miners would want a company like Chainalysis to be judge, jury and executioner of the bitcoin network.

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

There are protocols that work around address banning

China has basically fully eliminated bitcoin mining.

I think, if the SWIFT ban really was "on the table", they would be making the case for China's own CIPS/CBCD system, if Russia decided to opt for such service as an alternative.

TIL the NSA [1] has it's tentacles in SWIFT too..

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWIFT#Monitoring_by_the_NSA

The NSA targeting SWIFT is interesting because it's difficult to legally justify if one (or especially both) parties are US citizens. But spying on CIPS is exactly what the NSA is supposed to be doing. It's unlikely they are not.

Tell me you don't know how bitcoin works without telling me you don't know how bitcoin works.

Sir, this is a HN. Reddit is in the next tab. ;)

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