Guys quick question about the bitcoin consensus issue (I haven't been following it so not completely clued into what is happening), my understanding was the consensus was which ever chain had the most core clients open, but from what I hear the miners in china basically controls which chain to follow, is this correct? is that because if they don't upgrade the the amount of hashing power the new chain loses would mean it gets stuck for months+
and does the multi algo mitigate this for digibyte? if not is there a way we can mitigate this issue (not talking about a central authority)
The concensus of the network is determined by the chain with the
most work in it. Work is technically determined by the number of hashes (calculations) it took to find a hash that was equal or better than the minimum required for a given difficulty. So all blocks work is added together to get to the the amount of work in a chain of blocks. Multialgo does not alter the Proof Of Work specifics but enables more people to add hashes to the chain. That way the concensus is spread over a bigger number of miners and the more work there is in a chain the less likely it becomes some miner owns over 50% of the network. In case of DGB that miner needs the majority on all algos or 90% of one.
The rumor you heard is probably about the Chineese mining operations shutting down because they don't earn enough to pay their bills after the halving. Assumed that 10% of the hashpower would disapear, the difficulty is too high for the remaining 90% and the blocktimes will be an average of 11 minutes instead of 10. In the next retarget the difficulty will be recalculated and everything is fine again. Whatever happens the chain won't be affected much by miners ceasing operation.