Topic: Bitcoin - What if governments restrict or block electricity supply for mining? - page 2. (Read 266 times)

This was my first idea as well, when I saw the title of the topic. But it's not electricity that's the nr.1 problem if it's blocked.
What happens if the government forces the internet service providers to block the protocols that miners are using to send and receive data from/to bitcoin nodes or to the network?
I know that it's possible to mask/hide/encrypt the traffic, but this is an easier method to find and ban the people using miners and the solar/wind power won't help if they check the internet usage...

There is a one simple answer-Miners will move to another country or they will just create/use cloud minings. Its obvious,they paid thousand of dollars for miners to get funds and I don't think that they will surrender easily,therefore it will be groundless action from governments because everyone has right to use electricity,No matter how much if itsn't the threat to community's interests.In another situation, of course it would not be difficult for special investigative authorities to discover mining farms,but In the legal sense we are  very far from it(I mean technologically developed countries) because this process needs  many legislative initiatives and new, court precedentes.

I am not sure on how you would mask your operation but this is what I do know. As long as your operation isn't illegal it is more or less illegal to deny you service because of your charges. And if one companies decides to go that way, no doubt you will find another to take you on but I would still argue it is on the verge of being illegal despite the fact you can deny service to anybody.

If they are that keen on going after bitcoin miners no farm that is connected to the grid will remain hidden.
They can monitor your electricity usage even hourly and there is nobody that is normally using the same power as 5 S9 or more at 3am.

So the only way to do this would be to go in more isolated places and use solar and wind but that will be just to costly, imagine the size of the batteries you have to charge each day to keep mining non-stop.

But it will never happen...


Green energy and renewable energy sources are more expensive than traditional sources without subsidies from the government. If they were indeed cheaper the would be no gas coal and nuclear plants working anymore.



An s9 eats around 1000kwh a month almost the same as a household in India a year and two times the average household in France and Uk per month.
A couple of them in a country like Italy and you're going to consume more than all your neighbors.

If this will happen, the transaction confirmation will be affected. So i bet mining farms will make sure they will not be affected by such move by goveenment. Some might relocate to places where there is no manipulation. I've seen some development of making green electricity or renewable energy possible projects that are eyed by some mining farms.

Unfortunately not everyone can relocate to other Bitcoin friendly countries, so they are forced to change tactics to mask their operations. Weed farming was illegal in most countries and things changed over time. Why do we have to shutdown mining operations, when most governments are banning Crypto currencies, because they want to protect their own reserve currencies and/or protect their monopoly on money creation?

A year or two from now, they might change their minds and then you lost valuable time and money, because their policies and decision making was wrong or even rushed due to a lack of information or even based on misinformation.

I might sound a bit anti-government there, but I think most of these governments are making rushed decisions based on poor advice given to the policy makers.

Your memory is better than mine, thanks for the correction
But even so, there was a point where this pool *could* have executed a 51% attack using their miner's hardware (without them knowing), but (obviously) they didn't... My main point is that even if a pool/farm controlls >50% of the hashrate, it is seldom in their own best intrest to attack the network. Those pools/farms are heavily invested in BTC, and an attack (and the following price drops because of the bad press) would probably hurt them a lot more than the BTC they would have stolen by remining some of the last blocks.

it wasn't a mining farm it was a mining pool called Ghash and it was lots of individual miners (and also their own hashrate) that were connected to that pool, when the article about the risk of 51% attack was published and these individual miners saw the possible threat drama they simply switched to other pools and their total hashrate dropped.

As usual, i was still editing my previous post while you were already replying to it (my fault, i should stop re-editing posts i already made)...

Basically: it's hard to answer the problem about the strenght of the network, but my best guess would be that if you push out the mining farms, the difficulty will indeed decrease, but as long as one entity doesn't controll >50% of the networks hashrate, it shouldn't matter that much if the hashrate decreases (so the difficulty decreases).
I remember back in ~2015, one of the bigger mining farms was rumoured to have >50% of the hashrate, and even then, it wasn't catastropic... It wasn't in their own monetary intrest to do a 51% attack anyways.
I also belief that if you push out the mining farms, ASIC development might slow down, but i don't think it will stop altogether... So a couple of years after the mining farms have been put out of business, more efficient ASICs will be distributed in smaller amounts to the home miners, so the antique ASIC's that are gathering dust in the old ASIC farm's warehouse won't be able to do a 51% attack, since they'll be outdated and, if turned on, won't controll >50% of the networks hashrate.

This is just my personal belief tough... Anything can happen...

As for masking your mining farm: i don't really think it's a good idear to start hiding mining farms... It sounds fishy thus gives bitcoin mining (and bitcoin) a bad rep with the general public. If you do everything legally and out in the open, i think it gives us, as a community, a better image... And the better our public image, the more people will adapt (also: my personal opinion)

I`m sure that, in the future,we will have mining farms that will produce their own electricity and they will be independent from the electricity network.Solar panels and wind turbines will become cheaper and easier to install.The mining farms will have to load batteries with the energy produced by the sun and wind,because of the inconsistency(there`s no wind and sun 24/7  ),but the cost of the batteries will be lower, as well.
I`ve never seen the police in my country to  discover weed farms by tracking the electricity consumption.

Ok, relocation to another country should not be the default answer for this problem. We already see Chinese Bitcoin farmers moving to more Bitcoin friendly countries, but that would centralize Bitcoin mining in a way. 


Ok, the protocol will balance out the difficulty, but it does not solve the problem that we might be losing a lot of hashing power. The very thing that strengthens the network.

Do you have any suggestions on how Bitcoin mining operations can be masked to make it more difficult for them to detect it?

you need to be running a mining "Farm" to be using a lot of electricity to begin to raise some flags. otherwise I doubt having a couple of ASICs as an individual and mining bitcoin is not using that much electricity more than having your gaming PC on and playing call of duty

and if some day the government did start to pull some shenanigans on mining farms they will simply relocate to a new area with a new government that doesn't pull the same shenanigans...

making and broadcasting transactions will always be fast... A valid transaction will usually be broadcasted to all nodes within seconds (given that the unspent outputs used in the transaction are in the UTXO sets off all nodes, no dust outputs, fee over the default minimum relay fee,...).
Confirmation times might be *slightly* slower in this doomsday scenario where more and more farms are being closed by the governement, however, every 2016 blocks there is a difficulty retarget, so every ~2 weeks the network should adjust itself so the average time between 2 blocks is once again ~10 minutes.

So basically, as long as the chinese governement (where, i believe, the majority of the farms are located) doesn't close more than 10% of the mining farms in a 2 week period, the effects would be more or less neglectible.
Offcourse, if they decided to attack all mining farms and completely close them in less than 2 weeks, the time between blocks might double or tripple untill 2016 blocks have been mined, at which point the situation will normalise.

Now, back on topic, i always believed that the power companies located weed farms by taking the difference between the sum of the electricity used by a certain block and the sum of electricity billed to the family's/companies using power in this block... As long as you don't steal your power, chances of getting caught running a mining (or weed) farm are not that high (at least, this is what i heared, i could be wrong).

An last, but not least, my personal opinion: I wouldn't care if ALL governement around the world slowly started to crack down on big mining farms... Push mining back towards the home user that is running 1 S9 and uses the excess heat to warm his house during the winter while helping the networks security... True decentralisation . Offcourse, ALL governements have to be in it, if (for example) all governements close mining farms except china, we'll see even more centralisation as we have right now (which would be bad)

That step by the government will slow down the complete bitcoin network and making transactions would take really long. But as people have great minds they will surely come up with places to mine bitcoin where it would be harder to track them and block the electricity. This will also give more work to the small miners allowing them to make more out of their mining.

Most governments are fighting a War on Drugs and they use clever tactics to detect "Weed" farms. If you have a very high electrical usage, then you are flagged as a possible "Weed" farm.

I have heard about Bitcoin miners being identified as possible "Weed" farmers, because their electrical usage was above the normal average.

This got me thinking. If governments wants to target Bitcoin farmers, they just have to implement the same kind of tactics as they have done with "Weed" farmers. this will only work for medium to large operations>

How effective can this strategy be, if they want to target the big Bitcoin farmers? How can you mask your operation as a counter measure for this strategy?

I know this will never shutdown Bitcoin mining completely, but it can reduce the total hashing power.

Let's discuss.