China voluntarily removes ability to subverted BTC blockchain!
About 60% of all global bitcoin mining was happening in China. In theory China could have seized all the hardware in China and hypothetical subverted the block chain with the 51% attack. That is off the table now.
Every 2016 blocks (every 2 weeks approximately) the mining difficulty is adjusted so that the average mining time between each block remains 10 minutes. It was last adjusted 2021-06-13 21:07:16* so the next one in theory should happen about that time on the 27th but with China out of the game, it might take a little bit longer for that to happen as 10 minutes per block could easily become 25 minutes per block with 60% less hashing.
(*ref: https://btc.com/stats/diff ).
One positive is that the difficulty should lower on the next re-evaluation sometime after the 27th. The prize for solving each block will be the exact same as it currently is (6.25 BTC for the next 1146 days, then it will be lowered to 3.125 BTC) but with less players in the game in theory for a short while each player should win a bit more.
One negative is that all that mining hardware in China will extremely rapidly be moved elsewhere in the world where overheads are favourable. The logic action would be to keep ALL that hardware powered off until after the difficulty changes down. But the hardware devalues very fast, so greed means it will be powered back up long before then, and the mining difficulty may remain the same.
But the big positive take away for me is that China has efficiently removed their ability to subvert the Bitcoin block chain. Long term that can only be a good thing.
Until the dust fully settles, my guess would be at least 2 to 6 difficulty adjustments (1 to 3 months), there will be large fluctuations in peoples valuation of BTC up and down individuals are scared by changes. The vast majority of people who own Bitcoin have no idea how it works under the hood, it is a lot like computers very very few understand how they work at the transistor level and everything in between. Bitcoin having no government control means that it's valuation is mostly decided by individual people, most of which are working more on feeling than understanding and logic. A single tweet can cause a major fluctuation in people valuation of BTC.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
