Topic: Could China (or similar) take control of Bitcoin? (Read 629 times)

Bitcoin is being regulated by governments because a lot of consumers are using it, and like anything that becomes a part of consumer financial life, problems arise. But these regulations ultimately help the market because it makes it safer for your average consumer to enter it, and reduces social downsides (e.g. terrorism and criminality).

And while I agree with everybody here that it's currently unlikely China (or some other big country*) would want to do this to Bitcoin, it's important to understand that it's absolutely possible.

(* On another thread, we've discussed the possibility of the USA doing this if Trump was elected, so he could kill Bitcoin and force everybody to use his own personal currency instead--for instance...).

And what proof do you have that it can't be done other than your belief?

All this is simple math on equations we know, we know the network is protected by roughly 600Exahash, we know we need roughly 2.5 million new generation ASICs worth around 12 billion and drawing 10GW of power to overcome that.
We know the central budget of China is 3.5 trillion, we know their total installed capacity is 2.2 TWH.

So why do you think it would be impossible?


You're confusing the unwillingness to do something with the inability to do it.
This is the same as VPNs , China could at any time kill them all since they control everything there, they will simply ban every gateway out of their GFC but they don't go to extremes because they want to give the people the mirage of freedom, if they will feel threatened by it, you're going to see what authoritarian control means.

That's your opinion and I respect it but I still won't change my opinion and won't be convinced unless you have proof of China's power that can actually take over bitcoin. Do you work in a Chinese government agency or any other government agency? Because like I said, if they can do that then they can destroy it too, but why is it all just a ban now and they can't do anything else with bitcoin?

I don't belittle or underestimate any government but thinking that they can do whatever they want is not necessarily true. There will still be barriers, things that they will never take over or destroy, which is why bans, blocks, warnings...are created.

I think China is one of the countries that hasarge numbers of Bitcoin in their portfolio and that would keep growing soon.
We can always make money from Bitcoin if we are able to hold which is what many investors are practicing so a better future.
It is important we look for ways even though we might not have the funds to invest but their are things we can do to earn extra funds and invest it in the market. I think China could be the largest holders of Bitcoin after the United States

For 80% the point would be that if you want to change something in the chain, like for good, as in "take over" then you need 85% to be exact not 51% because that is what the rule literally says for blockchain. Just for example, BCH tried to change bitcoin's blockchain, they got rejected, people didn't use it and people just ignored it, that is how it worked, we didn't accepted their offer, however when we added segwit, 85%+ suddenly accepted it and now we can use it, that is how it goes.

You may ask "why" but that number wasn't picked by us, that is just how it works and we go with it, like saying "why 21 million and not 42 million?", we didn't pick the 21 million neither, and that was just something that bitcoin had when it was started, same goes for all those logic questions.

China has banned Bitcoin several times before and the announcement of this ban by China had a huge negative impact on the market.  But that negative effect didn't last long so I think China alone won't have much control over Bitcoin.  However, China has a large number of investors and these investors can have a great impact on the Bitcoin market.  However, it will not be possible for China alone to take complete control of the Bitcoin market.

No, as we discussed here, China absolutely could take over Bitcoin if they wanted to, as could any country with their resources. I agree that they probably don't want to, but that doesn't mean that it's impossible, or that Bitcoin is some sort of magical force that can withstand any conceivable attack.

Talking about whether China or any country can control bitcoin or not, I think there will be no exact answer. The answer "yes" is just everyone's speculation, none of us know the true strength of the Chinese government, how can they arbitrarily give such an answer? Also, if you consider that they can control bitcoin, that means they can also destroy it but why haven't they done that so far and can only issue a ban?

No country is strong enough to control, stop or destroy bitcoin. That will only happen if all governments join hands, but this scenario is even more unlikely. That's why governments that don't like bitcoin can only issue a ban and can't do anything else.

 

Several posts here have made the point about whether China would want to do this, but that wasn't my question. My question was whether they could, and the answer to that question is yes.


China or some other country or entity with similar resources could absolutely take over Bitcoin if they wanted to. Decentralization makes a network resistant to a take-over, but no network is takeover-proof.

But OP, I want to ask you why China wants to control bitcoin and what is their purpose? Have you ever thought about the scenario if China or any country controls bitcoin but the rest of the world bans bitcoin to avoid manipulation from China, would controlling bitcoin be beneficial?

Remember that bitcoin's value comes from its decentralized nature and if someone can control it then it means it is no longer decentralized so no one needs it anymore. The idea of controlling the bitcoin network makes no sense, so I never thought this would happen.

51% is smaller than 80% but why only 80% and not 100%, for it to be sure? Hehe. Yes they have a good budget but I think they aren't only interested on it because if they do then they already did it long time ago and there will ever be no banning that will occur in both BTC and BTC mining. 2 to 3 billion dollars and 32 million a day worth of power is a lot of money and all of this is for the hopes of controlling BTC?

But, what can they get after this? To earn more profit? However, I think people will stop supporting BTC once they figured out that it is now fully centralized and China can only get a bad reputation which I'm sure they don't like for it to happen.

Going by the population of China and their technological advancements, China has the potential power to take control of the Bitcoin technology if they chose to. I am saying this on the basis of the two factors I mentioned earlier, which are the population and the advancements in the technology of the country and amongst its people. Although, we do not know the founder of Bitcoin by identity due to his anonymity, however, from his name, Satoshi Nakomoto, he is an Asian by thoughts and could have come from those axis. Interestingly, China is great enough to take charge of the financial technologies but may not be able to do so, because the government in itself have banned the adoption of such.

It wasn't the Chinese government that were incharge of the 50% hashrate but it was individual miners located in China and they'll all have different beliefs so this attack isn't possible. We have core believers of Bitcoin that are miners in China and they won't want anything to happen to Bitcoin Blockchain so they won't be in support of the Idea if it gets proposal by the government. We aren't the only ones tired of the government centralized fiats system and wants
a decentralized currency to succeed so you can forget about this thought of yours, nothing is happening to the way Bitcoin was built to operate, if after so many hard forks, nothing has happened and the Bitcoin Blockchain hasn't been affected, there's nothing any government will do to take down Bitcoin and be successful. The Chinese government have probably thought about this and didn't see a way they can pull it off.


They first have to accept Bitcoin before they can start planning any counter measure if this event was to come to reality but since the governments don't care about Bitcoin they won't have plans for this in their books. The Chinese governments are attacking Bitcoin and other related services in their country, other governments are doing the same thing in their various countries so what we should be more concerned about is the government coming to an alliance and try to ban Bitcoin globally instead of having this thought of yours but I get it as it's a discussion that shouldn't be swept under the rug.

If China did that there would just be a Fork, one way or the Other, China would Fork to their New Chain, or a Rebel Organization, maybe Bitcoin Foundation at that Time might be considered the Rebel Cause at less than 50% Consensus, and then they would Fork. Someone would Fork. And this was like the 1999 to 2000 Bug where Everyone thought the Missiles would Launch and we would all Die, when this Happened with Ethereum it was just nothing, it was no Big Deal, both Chains actually Continued to Work because some People didn't Switch.

Ethereum did it because of a Hacker, but if there were a Serious Disagreement it would be the same. Like how Aggroed Wrote a Steemit Magna Carta and they all left and Created HIVE. STEEM and HIVE were Built for Forks. There is no Reason for those and BLURT to be the Only ones, there should be 500 Steemit Clones. But China actually is kind of mad about that maybe, or was and didn't understand. By now there should be Universities in China Studying the STEEM Technology, Graphene. And all of this Exists between China and kind of American Anarcho-Capitalists is who is on the Other Side.

Most People don't even Notice, but it does Shape some of the Finances in American Politics. STEEM Platforms Fund Travel, they are Travel Blog Earnings Engines once an Account is Established, and Travel is Part of it Regularly. And it is also a Political Finance Engine in the same way. STEEM Platforms can Finance anything, like GoFund me but Better, more kind of "Democratic" You might Call it. But there are still so few Platforms we could also say they are anything but Democratic because there aren't 500 Options with 500 Themes and 500 Teams of Devs and Business People Running them. But all of this is Good for Money, and if it Happened with Bitcoin, it would be similar. It would matter where it Mattered, and most People wouldn't understand it.

Most of the International Problems are about kind of Eastern European Hackers asking for Ransoms. That has been a Big Problem. But not just them, that is just a Generalization when I said Eastern European, a lot of the Ransoms do come from there.

In theory, there's no specific amount required to launch a network attack.  You only need at least 50% to sustain the attack indefinitely, although, as you rightly pointed out, initiating such an attack would likely lead to a significant drop in price (unless the attacker exclusively mines empty blocks, good luck moving coins in that case, lol).

The pressing question is: Why would China or any other nation undertake such an action?  What would they stand to gain from it?  Investing in and implementing new tax regulations could offer them benefits, providing additional revenue sources for their tax systems. 

Yuan, not yen, the yen is Japan's currency!
This is actually funny when people talk about de dollarization and China replacing the $ but half of the population doesn't even know their currency name!


As long as you don't change the algorithm the attack will not cease, and changing that and render all legit miners useless will be just as bad, and even so will just earn you a bit of time till they build the new asics. Even PoS will not be a solution, they could simply buy their validators and good luck stopping that!

Bitcoin miners, if don't have their mining ASICs physically and geographically installed in China mainland, but are in other places, can quickly configure their ASICs and connect them to other pools.

China ban on Bitcoin mining years ago only cause a Great Mining Migration to other countries around China and to the USA. It did not kill Bitcoin network but make its stronger by being more decentralized. China government opened a Pandora box years ago.

Because Hong Kong is still not fully under control of China in politics and other things. China mainland government always want to bring Hong Kong back to their control and will continue to do this in future.

Around 50% of hashrate being under control of a certain company and located in China is a very different thing from China as a state being in control. China seems to have chosen a policy of avoiding and restricting Bitcoin, with an exception to Hong Kong.
I don't think that any major economy would try to nationalize major Bitcoin mining farms to gain control of hashrate, and I don't think it's that simple to do it because if someone suddenly creates a huge demand, the prices (for mining equipment and mining companies) will rise, so it'll be a race. There's just not enough motivation to attempt to do something like this and to spend tons of money on it.

Am going to speak from the point of recent happenings and it is that, China is really and firstly more interested in making the BRICS currency their own local fiat currency, of which is the Yen. They want to dominate and along with other interested countries, create a new world order that means dedollarization in essence.
It is quite possible that China could decide to tweak cryptocurrencies or create a new kind of Blockchain that may have its own coin specific for the Chinese community, but that has already been done as we see Hashgraph technology being almost similar to the blockchain and even if China does decide to create its own coin for it's economy, it still won't be as original as Bitcoin and that's a major consolation.

1.It is technically possible, but the costs are higher than the potential profits.

2.What technical implications? I don't know what you are talking about.

3.I don't think that China taking control over Bitcoin will have any geopolitical implications. Maybe the only consequence would be the USA and the western world Banning Bitcoin.

4.If China takes over Bitcoin, most of the BTC developers, miners and users would fork BTC and move to the forked version of BTC. The version of BTC that was taken over by China would become useless and worthless(which makes the whole process of "taking control over Bitcoin" totally pointless).

3.

True and the conditions are like that if we pay attention. Well, of course China currently has a large percentage in terms of hashing network dominance and potentially in terms of their future dominance of BTC but my view is they are not major key players in the current global cryptocurrency landscape and that is just their Long-Term Strategy.

Simply because everything will lead to a shift in the world economy, of course, it is unlikely that it will be controlled and fully and will depend on one country or single player because many things and factos also affect the growth of this industry.

In as much as China is against the utilization and bitcoin adoptions,China could possibly want to totally get all round control over bitcoin.
However,China's competence to completely take control of bitcoin could be at 0.1 level.Before ever any country wants to authoritates bit coin,she should be capable of solving at least the threatening and consumable activities that are going on or going to occur.
China will not engage bitcoin or whatever they intend doing to bitcoin cannot be predicted or managed under normal circumstances.

It's still legal to hold and trade Bitcoin in China. All they have done is precluded their banks from holding Bitcoin on their balance sheets.

China still contains a sizable percentage of worldwide Bitcoin mining, so it is by no means "banned" there.

And even if China hated Bitcoin, that doesn't mean they wouldn't attempt to take it over.

I don't know why I feel repulsed whenever I see a mention of China in relation to cryptocurrency, anywhere. I guess it has to do with how China let this industry down by banning crypto activities in that country in 2017. That action was one that hit me hard at the time as a newbie in this industry. Then China was in a lead position in the space with lots of mining hash from there. That was then. In today's reality  I don't think anyone should as little as accord China a second thought once this industry is concerned.

This is a good point. They could also cause a death spiral by getting 51% for just a few days causing bitcoin price to tank and miners to go bankrupt much faster and making it easier to maintain the attackers >51% hashrate. So might only require ~100mil worth of total power to end bitcoin. The limiting factor in both cases seems to be the ASIC miners but china has a monopoly on that.

Im not sure if China would have to build additional power plants for this or not. If so, that would greatly increases the cost to pull this off. They would need 12-20GW of power and I think China is capable of producing ~900GW as a whole country.

That's not last September, that's when the article was updated.
Cambridge, which is the main source quoted there stopped doing any kind of regional research at the end of 2021.
https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/mining_map
The 21% number is an approximation from December 2021!


You see this is why I love the contradictions people keep falling for in this field
On one side we have the pitchforks lighting up when we talk about bitcoin energy consumption as we compare them with Christmas lights and then we claim it's impossible to make an attack because it requires a lot of power which no country has...so...which one?

First, there is a mistake in the percentages, they don't even need 50% of the current hashrate!
They could simply buy 3 billion worth of equipment (resell price) so way cheaper produced and with that 30% added they would force a ton of other miners in bankruptcy, taking over the hashrate pie, so rather than adding 600exahash to subdue the current one they could simply replace them by bankrupting and making mining less profitable for other miners, while still making some money.
Instead of 600 exa costing 12 billion in gear, it could theoretically be done with half of that, again at resell not producing cost, Beijing municipality has a 110 billion yearly budget!

Why would they need 80% and not just 51%?

China has no problem finding the money to build large scale infrastructure projects. I don't see how it wouldn't be possible for them to get 5-10 billion dollars worth of ASIC miners. Also with the current block reward it would only require 32mil USD a day worth of power to produce majority of the hash power. Based on my rough math this would require a 12GW power source and china has a large number of power plants to spread that over. For reference Chinas largest power plant is Three Gorges Dam with 22GW.

To take control of bitcoin, you need to take control of 80% if not all the networks and even at that moment, you'd still need a lot of power and money (for the equipment) to be able to pull it off and China's lacking in money already if you're keeping up with the Chinese stuff that's reported by investigative reporters so I don't believe that it's in their agenda to take over the bitcoin network anytime soon, pretty sure that whatever they're doing now, bitcoin or any cryptocurrency has no relation to it or anything like that.

They don't now, but they very well may in January of 2025. That's why the Chinese are doing everything they can to get Trump elected.

Yes, they already have a lot of coins too.

China oppresses people I think.

North Korea oppresses people I think.

These people have control over freedom?

Wtf?

And it's not the people we see on camera either, those guys must be miserable.

It's the anon's.

The sun will shine on them one day, however.

Why would they now?

They already own the Oval Office.

Theres no incentive to attack the network now but if bitcoin is to become more adopted by certain nations it will become a target. If a country like the USA ever tried to adopt bitcoin it would have to stock pile billions of dollars worth of ASIC miners to potential secure the network if china tried to attack it. Which i'm sure china would try to attack in times of war. So the USA will most likely never adopt bitcoin because it would be to expensive and uncertain if they could secure it. no way to really know how many ASIC miners china has stock piled. similar to a nuclear arms race.

What you're saying is 51% attack forever on Bitcoin which is technically possible but not in reality and I doubt China will be interested in doing it cause it costs billions just to keep the control for that they don't get anything at all so there's no point of any government try to take control of Bitcoin in that way.

That story is old, and it's outdated:

https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2024/02/05/china-never-completely-banned-crypto/

Binance is doing $90B per month in crypto trading in China, so it's not "banned" by any normal definition. Individuals can still buy, sell and hold Bitcoin in China.

As of last September, China had 21% of the world-wide hashrate for Bitcoin:

https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/mining/by-country/

So that "ban" isn't really doing very much for that either.

Regardless, whether China did or didn't fully ban Bitcoin on their own soil isn't really the point of this thread. It was discuss the possibility of a country like China having the ability to take over Bitcoin. The answer here seems to be: yes, they technically could, but it's unclear what they would gain from doing so, so in lieu of a strong motive, it's unlikely to happen.



Any entity that controls 51% of the hashrate controls Bitcoin, and while that has never yet happened, it's certainly possible.

No matter what facts you include here. A nation cannot control Bitcoins. It’s designed in such a manner that no one can have manageable access on it. Yes nations can track the transactions made with Bitcoins. They can impose a tax on it, but there is no way possible they can control it. China always promises things with high values but never able to prove it or delivers it. Hence its not at all possible.

I would ask a counter question: If China, Black Rock, Elon Musk or anyone able to take control of Bitcoin, why they didn't do it till now? mining rigs are limited, even they have a lot money they can't own a lot mining rigs. If they want to buy mining rigs from other miners, not all miners will want to sell their rigs.

Says who? China and Hong Kong are different, China completely ban Bitcoin while Hong Kong accepts Bitcoin.

That's for sure, that if half of the Bitcoin will be accumulated by only one entity be it China, other country or organization then they can easily manipulate the price fluctuations of it. Since they have the most liquidity, once they sell in large amount then price also will fall a lot. Same in on buying aspect where price could trade up higher easily by their own manipulation in price and supply. However that's not even true yet. Most BTC are in cold wallets and others were missing. That's why BTC is a great digital asset as how also complicated it is.

China didn't ban Bitcoin from their society, and it's still perfectly legal for individuals to hold and trade Bitcoin in China. The only thing they did is forbid their banks and financial institutions from holding Bitcoin on their balance sheet.

I feel like if China were to do this it would only be to go procure another session of FUD for everyone similar to how they keep banning Bitcoin from their society just to get the price down so they can buy more. Talk about a power hungry country! Hopefully they never do this as I could see it being a devistating time for Bitcoin and definitely a lot of folks rushing to get their money out as welll.

This has been discussed for years, and there was a time when Chinese miners comprised the majority of the miners for bitcoin and people were speculating that these miners could just do a 51% aftack and destroy everything.

To answer your question, no, they won't do that. The money involved in bitcoin mining is huge right now that it will be a grave mistake to perform any of these 'control' in the network. People will notice immediately, and once that happens, see how bitcoin lose its value since they lost confidence to it. It is technically possible, but rationally it doesn't make sense at all.

I agree with you (and others) that this would be no big deal to the world economy, but... Blackrock? Do they have a nuclear arsenal that I am unaware of? I'm pretty sure they are in no position to tell the CCP what to do...

Have you got any idea of how much energy it would take to reach satoshi's blocks? 


It would probably lead to total collapse for years. 


Right now?  Not exactly.  However, with the passage of time, we're witnessing an increasing number of powerful entities seeking a share of the pie.  For instance, Blackrock recently made investments worth billions of dollars.  Do you believe that Blackrock, the world's largest asset manager with over $10 trillion in assets, would tolerate another country attempting to undermine their own assets like that? 

I agree with this. A trillion dollar asset evaporating would probably cause a stir in the news cycle for a few weeks, but the world economy would be fine.


I agree with this, but I think the cult is starting to fade and people are starting to get more... real. You can only repeat a mythology for so long while the predictions don't come true before even the hardest of hard-cores get tired of saying, "someday...".

Today Bitcoin is a meme investment and nothing else. All of the hoo-ha about "challenging governments" and so on is falling by the wayside because it's clear none of that was ever true.

And the future of digital currency, in terms of mass adoption by consumers, is centralized .

I currently run a node. Its not costly at all. The biggest expense was i had to upgrade my internet to allow >1TB a month of data. Which was an additional $20 a month.

Not sure what you mean by transactions regularly fail. I've never heard of a legitimate transactions failing on bitcoin

I actually do agree with you on bitcoin being a cult. It seems satoshi disappearing might have been a bad thing for bitcoin because now everyone worships him like a god and any mention of deviating from his original protocol is turned down.

Well they could do that hypothetically but I still don't get why would China of all countries would want to do that!

You say it would "rattle the entire world economy" but I don't think so. Even if Bitcoin died today, it will only affect a small portion of the global population that has adopted Bitcoin (5%-10%).

What else would they gain if they had control of Bitcoin? A centralized and censored payment system in that hypothetical scenario.
Well they already have one that is pretty successful called Digital Yuan and last I checked its adoption was going fine and had already processed trillions of Yuan worth of transactions. And that only costs them a teeny tiny fraction of what it would cost them to actually mine bitcoin at large.

from what i can tell: no individual or entity currently controls* the bitcoin network & it would be very hard to

* but what if i told you bitcoin has already been infiltrated from within? what if it was led down a path to make it unusable as money, it's been turned into a digital gold like token traded on wall st. it's just number go up technology at this point

no base layer privacy, no future proof on-chain scaling, lightning failing to gain adequate adoption - too expensive to run a node, transactions regularly fail, it's not easy to get privacy, still not fungible

i used to think roger ver was an idiot, now i realize he was right, it's just so hard to challenge the status quo when the media is controlled by a literal cult - they have a lot of influence over bitcoin & most of crypto in fact. monero is one they're trying to keep quiet because it currently works & provides real privacy to those who seek it (no you're not a criminal for wanting privacy - this is mind control by the state)

I think that the ban on mining means that China doesn't want to take control of Bitcoin and doesn't care about it. Also, any country that tries to directly demonstrate its will and possibility of taking control of Bitcoin, will fail because in such case people will abandon it and move on to a different coin. Ask yourself, there are many cryptocurrencies and why is Bitcoin the most popular? That's because it's the most decentralized, the most adopted and most independent compared to other coins. If any country takes control of Bitcoin, then Bitcoin will lose the main value that makes it the most popular and valuable currency. If Bitcoin loses that value, then people will abandon it and move on to altcoins and the country will be left with control of coins that people don't want to use. That would be a waste of money and resources from any government, so that will never make sense.

How would they score 1T, such an attack will only make losses, them having 51% of the mining power doesn't mean they own the coins, at most they can harm the value but there is no financial gain in this unless they double-spend.


I think this is something a lot miss when somebody is buying 100k worth of Btc that money are not really in some bitcoin fund, the actual money is in the pocket of the guy who has sold that BTC to you, and by the time you move your coins in cold storage they could have already been spent on hookers and Lambos, and funny enough, they moved not to the lambo but to the pocket of the guy that sold it, so the money is no longer there, it's just a price tag that somebody else might honor but again, it needs money for it.

That is the reason if MS loses its coins you won't see the economy taking a 10 billion hit neither would a fall of NVIDIA cause a global recession on its own. Much of that 1.5t is in unrealized gains, money that was never there in the first place.

China is a dictatorship, and as such they would have central control over whatever hardware physically resides in the country. Of course my scenario also includes other ways China (or some other big country) could achieve this by taking over other servers throughout the world through force or bribery.

As for the rest of your points, I think you're missing the fact that current holders of Bitcoin would be held hostage by somebody who took over the network. You say "people won't accept it" but people... want their investment back if it is threatened. I think of China (or whomever) did a hard fork, brokers and individuals would be incentivized financially to go along with lest they lose their investment.

Don't get me wrong, I'm talking about a hypothetical scenario here, but clearly somebody who tried something like this would probably think through the ways that they would be able to get everybody on their side, even if reluctantly so.

This is not a very accurate statement.
There were multiple mining pools that were inside China and a lot of hashrate (many of which was located outside China) connected to those pools. Pretty much the same thing is happening with pools in other countries like the situation that is growing in USA.
That is a big distinction to make because in this case China did not and could not "control" that hashrate.

Not quite.
With a high percentage of hashrate, one can perform certain attacks but they can not change the consensus rules (if that's what you mean by dictate the software in use). They can pull off 51% attacks to double spend but what would that achieve except kill Bitcoin?

They also won't be able to attack Bitcoin for long in my opinion because such a move would bring on a lot of public outrage which could even lead to a hard fork changing the mining algorithm.

Bitcoin is not big enough to have an impact on the world economy. Not to mention that if China wanted to do that, they would do it without needing something as small as Bitcoin. For example they could dump the US bonds and crash US economy and burn half the world's economy with that. Or simply stop exporting goods to certain countries including US and EU and crash their economy by causing hyperinflation,....

That logic is flawed in this context.
If you have hashrate you "insert" your blocks and make profit. If you perform an attack, you'd crash the price and doesn't matter if you mine 100% of the blocks, you won't make any profit.

That requires a hard fork which means it requires the entire network to accept that change and upgrade to a new software. Otherwise they'd create an altcoin and what they'd sped would not be Satoshi's coins.

Similarly requires a hard fork.

Any kind of attack on Bitcoin would first crash its price. Depending on the attack it could be significant which means a lot of the goals you listed above would never be reached (like making profit).

Bitcoin is not big enough and is not weaved into the geopolitics to have such an impact.

It would force developers to get off their fannies to start working on decentralizing mining more. Like introducing a much better protocol for mining pools.

I'm more worried about US performing such attacks on Bitcoin than China doing so.
For starters, China doesn't have any significant hashrate ever since they banned mining. And also China is not known for destabilizing global economy like this. In fact China prefers more stability in the world so that they can make more money.

US regime on the other hand benefits from chaos, whether it is armed conflict that fills the pockets of the "Lords of War" or it is economic chaos where they can pull off their Ponzi scheme commonly known as the dollar.

It currently cost 32mil USD worth of power per day to 51% attack bitcoin based on the block reward of 200-250k. This is easily doable for china. The other hurdle for a 51% attack would be to get ahold of all the mining hardware needed but china basically has control of bitmain. so china could turn out all the asic miners they need for a cheap price compared to other countries. might only cost 2-3 billion. So yeah china could easily shut down bitcoin. They haven't yet because theres no need to. However if bitcoin was adopted by some NATO allies and NATO sanctions china for invading Taiwan then China would 100% shut down bitcoin in retaliation of NATO sanctions.

They can't do that even if they go full dictator mode on people that are still using bitcoin in their country, they're also going to hijack a lot of networks to be able to do anything significant and it just so happens that most of them is spread throughout the world and there's no way that China would be able to conquer the world, they're a boy in a man's world when placed together with Russia and USA, they can't even make a decisive move and win against Taiwan. China is also falling apart economically and I don't think that they're going to see any point trying to control bitcoin because they're currently lacking the money and they're currently squeezing too much money from their citizens because their officials are risking having their lavish lifestyle being lost.

Could China (or similar) take control of Bitcoin? And my answer is Yes everyone can control of bitcoin if they had enough money and enough resources

And if you talk about a country it definitely can do that, 51% attack is doable right? And then if you want to do price manipulation you can buy as much as bitcoin and then can be act as a whale. Tho this is just my opinion guys

In this case the nodes aren't the attacker they are the ones trying to save the network by forking it. The attacker would be who ever is posting empty blocks

How exactly would you know who the "attacker" is? Nodes are nodes...

If they are trying to destroy the network they would keep posting empty blocks and if the bitcoin nodes fork the chain then the attacker will redirect the hashing power to the forked chain to continue the attack. So if a 51% attack happens we'd have to wait for the attacker to stop, spin up more hash power or change the proof of work algorithm.

Don't over work yourself because the tasks available are merely simple and easy for everyone to accomplish but most people wouldn't give such setting and always in for the promising projects. Bitcoin can be manipulated based on the price value of the system, secondly followed by whales and top companies. It's never appreciative to always been on the winning side and losing sides comes with different pattern. We're learning everyday and making crucial mistakes.

China is more concerned about their money being used by their people. it will be more disastrous for their CBDC.

i don't think they can take over Bitcoin, they may however have more than 50% but more countries will do the same if they have plans like this. BlackRock who is somehow investing in mining farms can also do the same. it's just a battle of hashrates. but won't it just end up having their own BTC fork and they will just be the only ones who will be using that forked coins?

While I agree that it wouldn't be some kind of global catastrophe, I think that in this thread at least, we've established that China absolutely could take control of Bitcoin if they wanted to...

The fact that Bitcoin has marketcap over $1T is not making it important to global economy. Was $1T actually invested in it? No, it's just the result of trading at high price multiplied by total supply. Bitcoin could crash to zero tomorrow and it won't affect the global economy because there's like 200-300 million people who own some Bitcoin, and only some percentage of them would be ruined financially if that happens.

But don't worry about it, Bitcoin can't be taken over easily, because it's a global network of thousands of computers and mining has proof of work, which makes it very expensive to take over.

Bitcoin is worth over one trillion dollars. China is a criminal regime that likes to steal things . They don't have to "love" Bitcoin in order to try to steal from it, or hold it hostage, etc.

China's current policy with respect to Bitcoin is to forbid their banks from holding it as an asset on their balance sheets. If your plan was to screw around with Bitcoin, that's the... first thing you would do--get your country's banks out of the way of the damage.


I pretty much agree with all of that. The point about this not being a major geopolitical event is well-taken: that's both a reason China would do this (because they could score a cool $1T in winnings from their crime) and also a reason they would not do this (if the effect would be negligible, then why even do it).

So I agree that the actual affect on things wouldn't cause a major disruption, the "terrorism effect" could potentially give them some reason to do it (maybe in concert with a bunch of other things as a lead up to invading Taiwan).



I get that, but they would too, and they'd probably have a careful plan about what they'd do in a careful sequence. For starters, they would probably work to hide the fact that they had control of a majority of servers. This wouldn't be very hard to do: they could have control of major US miners right now and we wouldn't necessarily know.

It’s definitely possible and knowing China, I know they will do everything to get it done especially if it is the way to get something they want (and they want a lot of things). I can see China doing this for political gain, how? That I am not sure but one thing’s for sure if China were to take control of 50% of bitcoin investors might lose some confidence on the coin.

1. Yeah, pretty simple if you're willing to spend enough.
2. What technical "implications" it's a 51% attack, it happened before on a number of coins, we have the precedent
3. Zero
4. A big dive followed by a migration to the next best coin, and the revelation that the majority is interested in the returns now the coin
5. You're overreacting, nobody would really give a damn, 1.5T in market cap doesn't mean 1.5T in wealth for the US, even now at least 70 billion out of those are locked in Satoshi's wallets, more are lost, a shitton is held by other people in other countries including China, as for rattling the world economy, common...Bitcoin lost 3 years ago 1 trillion in market cap and it wasn't the end of the world.

I wonder why you're even taking China into consideration on this because they will always have the reason to adopt their own CBDC and enforces their citizens to adopt the same as well, then cant raise support for the use of cryptocurrency, because its not what is going to make them regulate the economy as they wanted, while bitcoin is even a decentralized digital currency, i don't think any of these is possible to happen in the future with them because right from the onset, we already know the way they have always been fighting against the use of crypto within their country.

For further discussion, here's an old article talking about this possibility:

https://www.investopedia.com/news/bitcoin-wont-win-worldwide-adoption-because-china-controls-it-ripple-ceo/

Obviously the hashrate for China has changed, but my thesis here is that it definitely could happen...

This came up as a side discussion in another thread, and I thought it would be interesting as a top-level discussion here.

The notion is this: although taking over 50% of the Bitcoin hashrate would be a practical impossibility for any private actor or even a small country, China, as a country, has at times hosted over 50% of Bitcoin's hashrate, and it's thus plausible they could make this happen again if they wanted to.

And whomever controls over 50% of the hashrate can dictate the software in use, and/or dictate the contents of the blockchain. As the theory goes, if China wanted to wreak havoc on the world economy, or if it wanted to extract a ransom, or if it simply wanted to profit by inserting its own blocks, then... it could. They could do anything. Perhaps China could decide that Satoshi's blocks should be given away to charity. Maybe they change the architecture so that it worked better in China, or conformed to their "laws" or something.

So this brings up questions:

1. Is this technically possible?

2. What would be the technical implications of China doing this?

3. What would be the geopolitical implications?

4. What would this do the broader cryptocurrency sector?

5. Have major governments e.g. the US and NATO countries ever (publicly) announced any contingency planning around this problem? Putting a $1.5T asset at risk is something that could rattle the entire world economy. This seems like something they would at least think through?

Looking forward to people's thoughts...