
China wants an orderly exit from Bitcoin mining - svenfaw
https://qz.com/1174091/china-wants-an-orderly-exit-from-bitcoin-mining/
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joe_the_user
_As to mining farms owned by smaller players, especially those in the
mountainous areas of Sichuan and Yunnan provinces, simply locating the miners
is a near impossible task. A growing number of private owners of hydropower
plants in the two regions have begun to operate mining machines themselves as
the price of bitcoin has surged, Du Jun, founder of Node Capital, a Beijing-
based venture-capital firm focusing on the blockchain industry, told Quartz
prior to news of the latest crackdown. “How can you find them?” he asks._

Couldn't they be found by looking at their IP address?

The Chinese state has tremendous resources. It seems like if tell people to
stop mining bitcoins, the vast majority would do so and any minority which
didn't would be very vulnerable.

Also, it seems like China could stop bitcoin mining by blocking the protocol
using the Great Firewall or otherwise filtering bitcoin out.

~~~
SolarNet
That's a naive view of networking. The physical location of an IP address can
be very difficult to track down (and of course IP addresses aren't part of the
bitcoin protocol).

Bitcoin is also super low bandwidth, and it would be very easy to build a
custom proxy to circumvent the firewall. We are effectively talking about 3
megabytes (or even less) every 10 minutes (5 kBps). It could also be
obfuscated with stengraphy rather than encryption (e.g. a valid webpage, where
the spacing, or css properties are the (also encrypted) bitcoin blocks).

~~~
littlestymaar
> That's a naive view of networking. The physical location of an IP address
> can be very difficult to track down

Unless you are the Internet provider … And I do believe that Internet
providers in China would answer to Chinese government requests without
troubles (I doubt they would sue the government like they would in the US).

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TazeTSchnitzel
I am personally of the opinion that China swiftly killing off its
cryptocurrency mining industry overnight would be to the great benefit of
humanity. The sheer amount of electricity it wastes is an environmental
disaster.

~~~
tbabb
Agreed. Shutting down participation in the planet's largest pyramid scheme
doesn't have a lot of downside.

~~~
olalonde
Here is what a pyramid scheme is:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme)

Bitcoin is a distributed database that solves the "Two Generals Problem".
Please don't spread misinformation on things you do not understand.

~~~
bandrami
Sigh. The only sense in which it "solves" the Two Generals Problem is the
sense in which it will, over the course of decades, create a rainbow table for
it. None of the work being done is in any way socially useful (a crypto coin
based on, say, folding proteins actually produces a social good and so could
be equity based).

Decentralized proof of a transaction having occurred is in principle valuable,
but the token itself is not the store of value. The reason it is accurately
described as a pyramid scheme is because holding bitcoin for the purpose of
reselling it is exactly like holding a baseball card, or a share in Bernie
Madoff's hedge fund: it is based on the premise that someone will come along
and pay you more for it than you paid, despite no actual appreciation in any
fundamental value.

~~~
makomk
Do you have any idea how rainbow tables actually work and what it would take
to "create" one for the SHA-256 hash used by Bitcoin mining? In order to
create such a rainbow table, you would have to do about 2^256 SHA-256
computations. All of the Bitcoin mining ever done so far has carried out
somewhere in the order of 2^87.

To put this in perspective, the most power-efficient miners available right
now require 0.1 J/GH of energy. There are roughly 10^24 stars in the visible
universe putting out about 10^27 watts each. If you could use the entire
energy output of all those stars to mine Bitcoins with the most efficient
mining hardware currently available for the entire lifespan of the universe to
the present day, you'd still get less than 2^210 hashes, about 1/10^74th of
what you'd need to create a rainbow table for SHA-256. I'm pretty sure that
even upgrading this hypothetical universe-wide computational machinery to
hypothetical mining hardware that's as efficient as the laws of thermodynamics
allow wouldn't get you close.

~~~
FabHK
Isn't 2^210/2^256 = 1/2^46 ~= 1/10^14 or so? (1/10^74 is approx 1/2^245)

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abrkn
This is a good time to invest in electricity and facilities in Mongolia

> Mongolia hosts 10% of the world's known coal reserves at an estimated 162
> billion tonnes in 2011 with 17 operating coal mines

~~~
tanilama
Fun fact: Mongolia buys electricity from China

~~~
jrsks
Mongolia is also investing in renewable energy. For example the solar park in
Darkhan and the Salkhit wind farm, but of course these are not closely enough
to cover Mongolia's need yet. In the meanwhile the population of Ulaanbaatar
has to breathe some of the most toxic air in the world.

However, Mongolia seems to be one of the few countries, where Bitcoin mining
seems to make sense, because of cheap energy and it's complicated economic
situation that makes producing and exporting goods very hard. With Bitcoin
they don't have to ask China or Russia for permission to cross the borders.

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coinGuyBri
Not gonna happen, they just wanted to stop it and get a piece of the pie.
Mining will resume in China

~~~
tanilama
Chinese government hates everything it can't control, especially related to
money. That is just a fact.

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amorphid
Can they track mining operations down by looking for abnormally high power
consumption?

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squaredpants
Maybe these operations will incorporate solar + battery storage into their
systems if they want to stay alive... Be less efficient and less productive,
but be legal, environmentally and socially responsible (sucking this much
power from the public system is not responsible), and still profit.

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dcow
It's things like this that really make the west seem backwards. Did you know
the average Chinese citizen has more representation in their government than
the average US citizen cf. [https://aeon.co/ideas/one-way-the-us-and-the-eu-
are-less-dem...](https://aeon.co/ideas/one-way-the-us-and-the-eu-are-less-
democratic-than-china)?

~~~
eddieplan9
Comparing China's National People's Congress to the US Congress is ludicrous.
The NPC holds one annual session lasting less than 2 weeks, and passes
legislations often with 99% Yeas. Every Chinese knows that the NPC is largely
a show and holds no real power despite what the constitution says. Wikipedia
summarizes it pretty well [1]:

> In theory, the NPC is the highest organ of state power in China, and all
> four PRC constitutions have vested it with great lawmaking powers. However,
> in practice it usually acts as a rubber stamp for decisions already made by
> the state's executive organs and the Communist Party of China.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_People's_Congress](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_People's_Congress)

