China is fast-rising market in terms of cryptocurrency. It has a pool of large number of miners as it continues to dominate the mining market. However, cypherpunk Jameson Lopp, said that the dominance currently held by China in mining might not last for a long period of time.
Lopp made this prediction keeping in mind that more mining chips are produced and other countries offer cheap power sources. He also made a fair assessment in his blog, which said that, China has a monopoly in terms of mining only as most of the facilities that manufacture of mining chips are in Asia and its cheap power.
“Over the very long term I expect we will see semiconducter foundries outside of Asia begin producing more mining chips and countries with even cheaper power sources will continue to become more industrialized, thus providing more competition when miners are seeking out new locations to set up shop. China‘s mining dominance is unlikely to last.”
Meanwhile, it should be understood as Loop says – decentralizing mining from mining pools gives individual hashers more control. He further noticed that their are two projects already implementing further decentralization to Bitcoin: Betterhash and Stratum V2.
China’s mining dominance, however, Lopp still believes the country doesn’t entirely pose a threat to Bitcoin.
“It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which a state actor would be able to quickly and covertly seize enough hashpower to perform an ongoing attack that lasts more than a few hours. A worst case scenario in which state actors did seize all of the physical equipment could result in China only mining empty blocks and orphaning other blocks that did contain transactions, essentially halting all transaction confirmations on the network. Then it would become a game of either patiently waiting for them to give up or coordinating a code change that would make their hashing machines worthless.”
