Actually no, they reversed laws that gave miners additonally advantages like cheap land prices, tax incentives and cheap electricity prices all over. These are just additionally advantages that are no longer in place by now. As stated in the article mining is now concentrated in 2 provinces, inner mongolia and shenzhen. I came to the same conclusion when making my worldwide electricity prices chart as electricity prices there are still at 2 cents and lower for some facilities.
Here an interesting article describing even the centralization within china. Give attention to the numbers!!!:
A group of Chinese cryptocurrency miners, who declined to be named for fear of government reprisal, said they have already shut down 20,000 rigs, or about 10 per cent of the total number of machines they operate at an average power cost of 0.4 yuan per kWh.
Their struggles, however, represent an opportunity to others. Jack Liao, who runs Shenzhen-based bitcoin mining firm Lightning Asic, said he bought about 50,000 pre-owned bitcoin mining rigs that were put up for sale in the market over the past few days. About 70 per cent of the machines he bought were the Antminer S9 model, which cost him around 500 yuan per unit. A new Antminer S9 goes for up to 3,000 yuan.
- The miners that have shut down 10% of their mining operations paid 0.4 XUAN for electricity, that’s 6 cents. Not many regions have access to 6 cent electricity and have in mind that was not enough to stay competive either.
- These guys shut down 10% (20.000) units, means they control 200,000 units all over. That’s huge.
- As i showed in my amateurish research about electricity prices there is mining concentration in some chinese regions in China with </= 2 cents per kw/h. This article just backs it up as the other guy there is buying the asics and putting them online. This article even shows how there is mining centralization within China itself.
- Have in mind that all chinese miners have the advantage of not paying custom taxes, high shipping, whatever. This alone gives them an advantage of at very least 10-20%, mostly more on the hardware price itself.
- Now have in mind that if a chinese miner at 6 cents has to lower his mining operation, what’s left for us with 10 cents or above?
- There is no chance Washington, whatever can stay competive with 2 cents for electricity, leave alone tax rates, hardware prices, work hour costs, shipping costs, custom fees, whatever.
Further, the most recent research done by the Princeton University & Florida International University, Miami from October 2018 (link at the end) comes to the conclusion that 74% of BTC mining/pools are located in China. Just logical to conclude that other currencies are more or less at the same level or will be at the same level.
Again, it’s all about electricity prices where you can concentrate mining, enough these facilities get access to it, which is obviously the case.
Even IF the hashpower the hashpower isn’t located in china, the chinese mining pools are anyway.
About the ones in Washington and other parts of the world, sure, here and there might be some bigger facility, but 2 of the top ~top 20 facilities outside china allready went bankrupt, again, shifting more hashpower to china. The same would happen to gpu mining as well, just a bit slower, no doubt there either.
Most interesting parts of the research report:
Regulatory authority: The Chinese government enjoys broad regulatory
authority that it can bring to bear on domestic Bitcoin users, exchanges, and
> miners. Regulators have issued policy decrees to directly influence the exchange
> and mining sectors and also targeted Bitcoin indirectly through externalities
> like energy prices (see Appendix 1 for details).
Well-connectedness within the Bitcoin network: Which blocks reach
consensus in Bitcoin depends in part on how quickly they propagate through
the network from their source miner to other peers. Blocks found in China are
> already proximate to a majority share of hash power, so they can reach
> consensus more quickly than blocks found elsewhere. If the Chinese
> government assumed control of domestic hash power, this property would grant
> them an advantage in selecting blocks for the ledger, which is important for
some types of attacks (see §5).
Most interesting in this paper are the attack scenarios and how chinese mining pools could attack BTC at any given point successfully. I admit i wasn’t aware that it’s that serious. This report is a must read for everybody interested in network security in my opinion. Just some interesting parts related to the hashpower and mining pool concentration:
With control of at least 51% of the hash rate, Chinese mining pools could
simply announce that they will not mine on chains containing transactions from
their list of censored addresses. This is called a (a) punitive forking attack.
With less than 51% of the hash power, Chinese miners could still attempt to fork
whenever they see a censored transaction, but some attempts may fail. However,
the forks that succeed orphan the blocks found by miners that include censored
transactions, reducing their profits, so some may be convinced to follow China’s
censorship rules. This is a (b) feather forking attack [32,36]. As both attacks
require announcing intent, we classify them as overt.
One way China could reduce the hash power required for forking-based censorship attacks is through an (c) eclipse attack [23]. By directing a large number
of peers to monopolize all incoming and outgoing connections to specific victim
nodes, this attack controls what those victim nodes see and do in the Bitcoin
network in order to prevent them from learning about the transactions China
wants to censor. This reduces the portion of the network that is counteracting
censorship attacks by trying to approve the transactions China is trying to censor, meaning that less hash power is required to succeed at censorship, especially
if the targeted victim nodes are miners with substantial hash power. This attack
can be performed covertly, as victimized peers are unlikely to realize that their
connections are being manipulated.
The final attack that China can employ for censorship is (d) Internet traffic
tampering using the GFW and control over domestic ISPs. China could either
block blacklisted transactions originating in China from propagating or prevent
blacklisted transactions originating outside of China from entering the country
and reaching Chinese miners. This attack is overt because it would be clear
to Bitco
Disrupt competing miners: In addition to targeting Bitcoin users, China can
attack other mining pools in order to consolidate their control over Bitcoin and
make other attacks easier. The (a) selfish mining strategy described above is
one way to achieve this goal; as miners losing profits join the more profitable
Chinese-controlled pools, they also enter China’s zone of control. [15] outlines a
number of more direct attacks on competing mining pools, and in this section
we highlight two that China is capable of.
In both attacks, China could direct their hash power to pose as mining participants in other pools and then undermine those pools. The simplest version is
a (b) block withholding attack, where Chinese miners submit partial proofs-ofwork (PPoWs) but do not submit full blocks when they find them [45]. This may
not arouse suspicion because the probabilistic nature of mining means that it is
reasonable that a given miner finds many PPoWs but no full blocks, but the mining pool will be missing out on block rewards. This may cause that pool’s miners
to abandon mining or switch to a more profitable (possibly Chinese-controlled)
pool.
The other possibility is that Chinese miners posing as contributors to a foreign pool could wait to submit a found block until a miner outside the pool
broadcasts one, creating a fork. In the paper describing this (c) fork after withholding attack, Kwon et al. [29] show that it is profitable for the attacker, thus
reducing other miners’ profits by the zero-sum nature of Bitcoin mining. Both
attacks have low hash power requirements to deploy, but their success rate improves substantially with increased hash power [45]. They can be covert over
short periods, but over time produce visible signatures, making them overt over
long periods. 8
The Looming Threat of China: An Analysis of Chinese Influence on Bitcoin
