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Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

there are degrees of decentralization, but mostly people are just allergic to the word

trust minimized is valid as well

doesn't really matter. in less theoretically secure networks, validators don't reverse transactions because doing so deters commerce to their network. it works well enough, the market can bear it. a state that disagrees with it would still have trouble coercing all of the validators, and the state can buy up all the tokens with public money to try to become the majority of the validators... be my guest, I would call that success because its a moon cannon. All the holders get rich because a silly government agency pumped the coin to try and take over a network.

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When 65% of the currency is mined in China, that's not exactly decentralized. Folks long BTC are exposed to the risk that the CCP will weaponize their mining share into a 51% attack.

[1] https://cbeci.org/mining_map

Why not the US? Or Russia? It would be easy for a large state to dwarf the hash rate of the network if they wanted to sabotage it.

theoretically less secure networks and the nomenclature around "validators" refers to Proof of Stake networks and Delegated Proof of Stake networks, of which bitcoin is neither.

so this discussion isn't about Bitcoin

but I can understand how that might not have been clear. I'm not saying these points don't also apply to bitcoin in some degree, this thread just wasn't about it.

Fair point.

I doubt this would happen, but I could very well see the CCP cracking down on coin mining for host of different reasons.

Just because a large amount of mining is done in one physical location doesn't mean it's not decentralized.

All mining is done on earth. Does that mean it's centralized?

I think the implication is that the Chinese government has influence over the currency. If that's true (and I don't think it is, or that they even have any interest, given the rise of crypto capitalism in HK and mainland China) then they could at most attack the network once, completely destroying its value. Sounds like a lot of wasted energy when people can 1) fork BTC to circumvent this 51% attack, and/or 2) opt for another currency to replace BTC as "digital gold".

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