Quote from: PrimeNumber7 on July 05, 2021, 09:08:35 PM

Quote from: Pmalek on July 05, 2021, 07:12:05 PM

Quote from: PrimeNumber7 on July 05, 2021, 02:26:42 PM

There is the risk of a government-sponsored 51% attack.

If we start reading reliable news coming from miners directly that someone (be it the government or anyone else), is starting to confiscate huge numbers of mining units, we could be closer to such a scenario. But it's still an expensive attack to maintain even if they gathered the required amount of hardware.

I think the Chinese government has reached its goal. Chinese miners have been shut down, they have seen what will happen to them, and their mining operations in China are now a thing of the past. With them out of the way, the communist party can now switch their attention to the digital yuan.

I don't think the Chinese government getting miners to stop mining in China achieves anything of substance. If the miners are allowed to move their equipment overseas, the Chinese government would be hurting their own economy, and bitcoin would still be making it more difficult for the CCP to control it's population.

Information does not flow freely out of (or within) China. So if the Chinese government is seizing miners, there is a good chance this will not be publicly known. The cost to maintain a 51% attack is pretty low if you exclude the cost of the equipment. The cost of a 51% would be the cost to run the equipment, which is, with the most advanced ASICs is a fraction of the expected value of the bitcoin that would be mined absent a 51% attack.

We also had the effect of having 28% of all mined blocks have no transactions via the recent 28% drop in difficulty, and there were not major issues with transaction fees rising, or the mempool getting clogged.

Going a bit OT from the original point of the thread so we might want to continue the difficulty discussion here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5307087.msg57392211#msg57392211

But I did want to point out that as of NOW 8:30 PM EDT 5-July there are 3 blocks of transactions in the mempool the 1st block would require a fee of 70+ sat/vb to get into it. the 2nd one you can into for 4 sat/vb and there have been no blocks for the last 30 minutes.

There are some really messed up fee estimators out there. And some places just paying a fixed fee, which may or may not be messing up the fee estimators.

-Dave