What’s to prevent China from aiming all its state processing assets and all its mining pools at the bitcoin blockchain to stage a 51 percent attack or at minimum destabilize the process? Let’s say some wealthy despot has decided that bitcoin, like the Internet before it, has become so influential that it is eroding his power. This despot could seize all the mining power within reach and purchase the rest from countries that still tolerate his bad behavior, to put him over the 50 percent hash rate threshold. He could then decide which transactions to include in blocks and which to reject. With
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