Topic: Could China (or similar) take control of Bitcoin? - page 8. (Read 1715 times)

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?