Please elaborate how you plan to identify all these US transactions in real time? I'm not in the US, so please list every single address I've ever been associated with so that I'm not charged more. According to kiklo, it's really easy
I don't know really. And that's the reason why I started this thread and openly asked about that in the OP. To be honest, the technical impossibility of such discrimination (based on IP, or wallet address, or anything else) is the only true reason why the Chinese miners might not raise the fees on a selective basis as an act of revenge even if Trump lives up to his promises and unleashes a trade war with China. All other arguments like irrationality of such actions, coercion by the government, lack of hashing power, etc are weak and can only somewhat limit the fee riot if things get serious. On the other hand, if things do get serious after all, the miners from China could still indiscriminately raise the fees for all...
What consequences would such events have?
A transaction is not associated with an IP address. There is no way to know where a transaction originates, but the Chinese government could identify transactions not originated in China
I got it. But what about wallet addresses? Some wallet explorers show which service a given address belongs to. For example, my own address, which you can see in my profile page and send your funds to (lol), is correctly determined as part of a Coinbase wallet. If we look at the home page of walletexplorer.com, we will see a
list of services like exchanges, pools, web wallets, casinos and so on, with
pages of addresses that belong to these services. As far as I understand it, most such services (if not all) have api's that allow to check if a given address is theirs. Otherwise, how could these wallet explorers determine the service a given address belongs to? If they can find that out, why can't Chinese miners do essentially the same?
And I guess this is not the only way to check which country an incoming transaction comes from
Online wallets usually do not provide the list of address they control or they would be compromising on privacy. Wallet explorer uses the known address of the various services and use taint analysis to determine which addresses are likely connected to which. For example, Bitfinex is a well known exchange and they have a cold storage and hot wallet address. If your address always sends the funds to those addresses, it is very possible that the address belongs to Bitfinex.
This has several limitations however. If the user were to use a desktop wallet or an online wallet that does not send their fund to a known address that is controlled by them, it would be close to impossible to identify who the address belongs to.