An all-time rich in apocalyptic forecasts turned out to be a week. This time it's not that bitcoin could collapse or pose a threat to traditional Finance. American researchers believe that the #1 cryptocurrency can destroy China, pursuing its own goals. The conclusions are based on, in General, a well-known fact — the share of Chinese mining pools in the bitcoin hashrate. Representatives of Princeton University and Florida international University specify that seven large mining pools account for "more than 80% of mining", with five of them located in China. According to the authors, only the share of Chinese miners accounts for 74% of bitcoin hashrate — more than enough for "51% attack". At the same time, the report States that Chinese policy, including the "Great Chinese firewall", provides local miners with certain preferences, for example, they can choose which blocks to mine. The authors claim that Chinese miners use this opportunity to their advantage to mine empty blocks, thus advancing the miner in the queue and increasing the amount of reward. However, the speed of the entire network from mining empty blocks suffers. However, the slowdown of the network is the least of the potential problems, which is fraught with a disproportionately large role of China in bitcoin mining, scientists are encouraging. According to them, Chinese mining pools can carry out attacks on the network in 19 different ways. One of them, known as the "Goldfinger attack", named after the antagonist from the film about superspy 007 James bond, who dreamed of blowing up the us gold reserve storage with the help of "dirty bomb", is able to destroy the Bitcoin network. However, the theoretical possibility of such an attack does not answer the question of why Beijing might need it, that is, what is its benefit from the fact that bitcoin will be destroyed. Researchers believe that bitcoin is an "ideological opposition" to Communist China, so the latter may be interested in "destroying it or weakening it." In their opinion, any damage to bitcoin's security can serve this purpose if it is obvious enough for everyone. There is another possible motive — in many countries, whose economies and currencies are weak enough, bitcoin serves as a safe haven to protect funds from depreciation. China could attack bitcoin to indirectly harm such countries, completely destabilizing their already weak economy. Note that concerns about the huge role of China in bitcoin mining sound quite regularly. Remember at least brad Garlinghouse and his message "bitcoin — Chinese money". However, it should be taken into account that the CEO of Ripple is directly interested in promoting XRP as a "non-Chinese" and alternative to bitcoin cryptocurrency.
