I agree that hashpower overly concentrated in one jurisidiction is a threat. But I'm not sure this is a result of patriotism, as the article implies. Probably USA just has cheaper power than Europe and laxer regulations compared to most other countries.
Some of scenarios laid out in the article, like a fully deanonymized permissioned network, would probably result in a hard fork.
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This is true and you know when I mentioned a lot of the hash rate is in Kazakhstan to my co-worker, he said "Well that's under Russian control" and I was like yeah but it doesn't mean that Russia controls it and the hash rate that's in the US doesn't mean the US controls it either, but this lack of understanding of how Bitcoin works is like, if the US does not control it then some other country must control it and that's a threat to the US and that just isn't the case at all.
Now, on the other hand, its kinda nice that 51% of the hash power isn't in China anymore XD
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All large hosting companies in America comply with US regulations that include taxes and KYC. And the biggest American miners don't even host, they just own and continue to grow their own hashpower outright with access to essentially unlimited cheap fiat.
This is a way bigger attack formation than the concentration in China was.
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I was just thinking about this and let's say there is some nightmarish scenario where one coordinated entity owns 75% of hashrate. That means they can on average command 3 out of every 4 blocks. Assuming the last 25% doesn't censor, that last 25% of hash power can still get blocks out, it just takes longer. Is that correct
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For additonal comments on the Bitcoin Magazine article, see an earlier post, where the article was first shared, here on SN:
Mining Concentration In America Poses A Major Threat To Bitcoin #70109 https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-mining-concentration-in-america
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