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Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

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Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#41

Post by foepys »

bpodgursky wrote: post #17
bob29 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Literally Germany's coal is specifically because its their own coal, a natural resource within their own borders they control. For national security, they maintain a coal capacity. Germany's coal burning is national security, nothing to do with environmentalists.

Arguments about Germany's energy independence would be far more compelling if they were not, for example, currently building giant pipelines to import Russian natural gas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream

That's mostly for heating, though. Heat pumps are being increasingly used in new homes but nearly all homes older than 10 years are using gas or oil furnaces. Electricity prices are also very high, amongst the highest in the world, so heat pumps aren't as cheap to run as in other countries. It's definitely a problem that needs to be fixed, potentially within the next 30 years because that's the timeframe where the law requires old furnaces to be replaced.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#42

Post by ArchD »

ChainOfFools wrote: post #30
2bitencryption wrote: post #14

> Significantly, the Xinjiang and Sichuan regions of China combined account for more than 50 percent of the overall Bitcoin mining hash rate I don't get it, doesn't this effectively mean China can force a 51% attack by just strongarming the pools that operate there?

yeah, well more specifically they could force a preferred fork to assume the "Bitcoin" ticker (BTC) by denying power to chinese miners on the disfavored fork. exchanges and miners, rather than the developers, ultimately determine this, as there's no in-band way to control what ticker is used for trading what token.

That's not how it works. In the event of a hard-fork, when the two forks adopt different rules about what blocks are valid, the actual users of BTC still decide which rules to follow. If a miner produces blocks that are invalid according to the rules that are adopted, the blocks that it produces are just disregarded. Thus, the hash rate competition between miners is only within each fork.

If you are talking about denial-of-service by producing empty blocks or blocks that exclude certain addresses, that's another matter...

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#43

Post by sillysaurusx »

dnautics wrote: post #37
2bitencryption wrote: post #14

> Significantly, the Xinjiang and Sichuan regions of China combined account for more than 50 percent of the overall Bitcoin mining hash rate I don't get it, doesn't this effectively mean China can force a 51% attack by just strongarming the pools that operate there?

No, it means that theoretically a 51% is possible but the levels of coordination required to do that and the ability of the bitcoin network to figure it out and ignore it are means that it is unlikely to be effective .

Plus, the model of BTC as “digital gold” is pretty resilient to 51% attacks: if you don’t touch your coins, no one can take them away from you. (A 51% attack can’t reassign coins.)

Of course, the price of BTC might tank in response to the news of a successful 51% attack, but it’ll probably bounce back just like every other event in BTC history.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#44

Post by almost_usual »

gruez wrote: post #34
almost_usual wrote: post #22

Something something bitcoin transcends govts

But the network is still operating despite government intervention? If the government sent Men With Guns to SWIFT headquarters then it will be actually down.

Men With Guns control land, Men With Guns control power. Men With Guns is not Bitcoin. Men With Guns is govt.

Bitcoin is a fiat leech with no real power.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#45

Post by pizzapill »

ekianjo wrote: post #38
pizzapill wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany is replacing nuclear/coal with wind/solar energy: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiemix#/media/Datei:Energi... (grey = wind, red = nuclear, black/brown = coal) Both nuclear and coal are shrinking since ~ 2000 and both sources of energy have been replaced by renewables since then. Currently ~40% of power produced in Germany comes from renewables. Wind energy has become #1 source of power from 0 twenty years…

Nope Germany is massively relying on nuclear energy produced by its neighbors.

2002 was the last year Germany imported more power than it exported:

https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/153533/umfrag...

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#47

Post by lovecg »

shp0ngle wrote: post #3

This is actually good for bitcoin

You’re getting downvotes, but I think (correct me if I’m wrong) you meant something like the hash difficulty will adjust down if this is an extended downtime. So we would have fewer miners, easier hash difficulty and the same block rate. This would indeed be better for the environment, at least for the short term. This and the reduction in centralization could be argued as being “good” for Bitcoin.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#48

Post by ChainOfFools »

gruez wrote: post #36
ChainOfFools wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, well more specifically they could force a preferred fork to assume the "Bitcoin" ticker (BTC) by denying power to chinese miners on the disfavored fork. exchanges and miners, rather than the developers, ultimately determine this, as there's no in-band way to control what ticker is used for trading what token.

That was tried a few years ago with the segwit2x fork. A group of miners comprising 82% of the hashpower got together and agreed to activate the segwit2x fork. Despite having a overwhelming majority of the hashpower the fork was never happened due to lack of community consensus. https://dcgco.medium.com/bitcoin-scaling-agreement-at-consen...

the consensus vote to activate sw2x on existing BTC network was an in-band mechanism, and set to some super impossible threshold like 95 or 99% to activate a protocol change.

this is a different situation, where an out of band entity can selectively shut off a significant fraction of hashpower, and unlike the weedy obscurity of an architectural spat between largely unknown (by the mainstream) such a move would (indeed, will) make major waves in mainstream Joe Pension Fund/ Number Go Up news, who will not be familiar with nor interested in the technical arguments for the fork that is being actively suppressed. there's no weeks-long debate window here.

the stakes are very different now than in the Jihan boogeyman days, you can't handwave away this critical risk to stability or spin it as technical trivia of no concern to non-specialists.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#49

Post by shp0ngle »

lovecg wrote: post #47
shp0ngle wrote: post #3

This is actually good for bitcoin

You’re getting downvotes, but I think (correct me if I’m wrong) you meant something like the hash difficulty will adjust down if this is an extended downtime. So we would have fewer miners, easier hash difficulty and the same block rate. This would indeed be better for the environment, at least for the short term. This and the reduction in centralization could be argued as being “good” for Bitcoin.

I actually meant it as a joke. Because according to Bitcoin enthusiasts, any news is actually good for Bitcoin.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#50

Post by paulmd »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #43
dnautics wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it means that theoretically a 51% is possible but the levels of coordination required to do that and the ability of the bitcoin network to figure it out and ignore it are means that it is unlikely to be effective .

Plus, the model of BTC as “digital gold” is pretty resilient to 51% attacks: if you don’t touch your coins, no one can take them away from you. (A 51% attack can’t reassign coins.) Of course, the price of BTC might tank in response to the news of a successful 51% attack, but it’ll probably bounce back just like every other event in BTC history.

> if you don’t touch your coins, no one can take them away from you. (A 51% attack can’t reassign coins.)

it can't generate new unsigned transactions but it can roll back the network to a state when someone else owned those coins. from a practical perspective there is no difference, you no longer have those coins.

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