>"If paypal wanted to ban my account they would do it already. Must be secure to store all my money there then".
Why wait for a longer chain? What do they stand to gain? Act now and secure control. If the network is a vulnerable as you say, why has China not made their move? They control a majority of miners, they control their country completely and even manipulate their traditional currency to stay competitive economically, why would they not seize control over the network before it the US govt. becomes interested in protecting it?
Right, but pool membership is voluntary. If a pool doesn't act in support of its miners then the miners will go elsewhere. Pools are like political parties, centralized in appearance, but if you ask the members of a party what they think you quickly see that they never agree on everything.
>I never said they are operated by the gov, __they are under its authority__. Because that's how govs worked for ages.
Which is the crux of the issue. As long as the Chinese person running the miner can point their miner at a different pool or switch software then the government does not control the miners. I'm not current on the state of Chinese political affairs, but I was under the impression that they are not that authoritarian. Knowing that, you cannot count all those pools as agents of the Chinese govt. and can't make an argument that they are centralized. Just because their best financial interests align currently does not mean they will be aligned in the future. In my estimation, the Chinese govt. is losing its grip on the Chinese economy, which leads me to believe that in the future the contral govt. will have even less ability to manipulate like they do now.
>"We would just change PoW". "We would just cut off China from Internet". Just do a thought experiment - those are not solutions
Except the "cut China off from the internet" is feasible, see this paper on the impact BGP hijacking could have on the network: https://btc-hijack.ethz.ch/. By your definition, nothing is a solution until implemented, which I think is a bit silly.
Of course we couldn't completely separate the Chinese miners from the wider Internet, but we could make any attacks on the wider network so hard to achive that the electricity they would waste trying to attack us would cost them more than being a good cryptocitizen would make them.
But then again, this is just an artifact of democracy when you replace citizens with CPUs. If more miners support one chain, that is the legitimate chain. That's what's outlined in the Bitcoin paper. This seems more like a political issue than a technological one.
True, I do conflate the two. But the article was about hashrate, and you do need enormous hashrate to modify even one past block. Attacks of that kind are fairly unreasonable, even on the scale of the Chinese govt.
Would I be wrong to think that every miner (or at least every entity who is mining, not nessesarily every computer that is mining) would have a vested interest in running a full node as well? That would put control of the nodes in roughly the same hands as those who control the miners right?
It doesn't matter. It only matters which nodes are used to record transactions on the blockchain. You can have a million nodes, but unless those nodes are recording transactions on the blockchain, it matters not.
Why wait for a longer chain? What do they stand to gain? Act now and secure control. If the network is a vulnerable as you say, why has China not made their move? They control a majority of miners, they control their country completely and even manipulate their traditional currency to stay competitive economically, why would they not seize control over the network before it the US govt. becomes interested in protecting it?
>"The 4th chart is actually the official hashrate distribution from https://blockchain.info/pools"
Right, but pool membership is voluntary. If a pool doesn't act in support of its miners then the miners will go elsewhere. Pools are like political parties, centralized in appearance, but if you ask the members of a party what they think you quickly see that they never agree on everything.
>I never said they are operated by the gov, __they are under its authority__. Because that's how govs worked for ages.
Which is the crux of the issue. As long as the Chinese person running the miner can point their miner at a different pool or switch software then the government does not control the miners. I'm not current on the state of Chinese political affairs, but I was under the impression that they are not that authoritarian. Knowing that, you cannot count all those pools as agents of the Chinese govt. and can't make an argument that they are centralized. Just because their best financial interests align currently does not mean they will be aligned in the future. In my estimation, the Chinese govt. is losing its grip on the Chinese economy, which leads me to believe that in the future the contral govt. will have even less ability to manipulate like they do now.
>"We would just change PoW". "We would just cut off China from Internet". Just do a thought experiment - those are not solutions
Except the "cut China off from the internet" is feasible, see this paper on the impact BGP hijacking could have on the network: https://btc-hijack.ethz.ch/. By your definition, nothing is a solution until implemented, which I think is a bit silly.
Of course we couldn't completely separate the Chinese miners from the wider Internet, but we could make any attacks on the wider network so hard to achive that the electricity they would waste trying to attack us would cost them more than being a good cryptocitizen would make them.
But then again, this is just an artifact of democracy when you replace citizens with CPUs. If more miners support one chain, that is the legitimate chain. That's what's outlined in the Bitcoin paper. This seems more like a political issue than a technological one.