Bitcoin Mining Concentration In America – Bitcoin Magazine

This is an opinion editorial by Shinobi, a self-taught educator in the Bitcoin space and tech-oriented Bitcoin podcast host.

Since the mining ban came to China, there has been a massive migration of Bitcoin hash rate to the United States. There have been many narratives and pushes from pro-American Bitcoiners to continue attracting more hash rate to the U.S., including pushing to create favorable regulatory environments for miners here in North America. This has been done under the premise of the historical strength of American property rights, which is a big part of why American capital and equity markets are the biggest in the world.

This is a huge miscalculation and is something that, if successful, will have a huge negative effect on Bitcoin in the long run. The entire game theory around the security of Bitcoin mining is decentralization/distribution. From day one it has been very clearly delineated that a majority (51%) or more of the Bitcoin hash rate can act maliciously in a way that severely degrades or entirely breaks the security of the entire system. They can orphan blocks from other miners, preventing them from even participating in the system to earn revenue in Bitcoin. They can exclude transactions from parties they do not wish to transact, again orphaning the blocks from any miners processing such transactions from the blockchain. They could selectively refuse to process Lightning channel closures properly, they could prevent peg ins or peg outs from sidechains. They can entirely break the censorship resistance of the system and undermine the security of not only the base layer but any secondary layer built on top of it to scale the system.

This news is republished from another source. You can check the original article here

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