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Comment by 3np | Hacker News Reader

"The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away".

Neither mining pools (who practically have the actual power over transaction inclusion an ordering) nor the miners are cooperating. I'm also certain the CCP wouldn't be practically able to locate and control all of them that easily.

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The emperor is only a few tens of milliseconds away, no matter where you are in China.

All the small dams or whatever power generator they are using are state owned property, hell even all the available internet access, and since they are the biggest supplier of money laundering vehicles and aids the capital outflow that the party hates to the bone, you better assume that they all have tabs being kept on already.

I'd assume their intelligence services are identifying miners now while the miners don't have incentive to hide. If China wanted to strike at bitcoin they could do it in one fell swoop.

Even in Western countries, if draconian anti-cryptocurrency laws were passed and even slightly enforced, it would kill, or at least force into regulation, large-scale mining operations.

Hypothetically how long would it take the country that produces most of the computing hardware in the world to simply direct all their factories to build mining ASICs as quickly as possible while not exporting any more GPUs? Of course everyone would know what comes next but I am just curious.

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