> The world's top Bitcoin mining pools mainly come from China, with five pools being responsible for more than half of the cryptocurrency's total hash.
I am US-based and run one of ~8,000 global bitcoin verification nodes (i.e. not a miner). No majority of these nodes are based in any specific country †.
You should probably better educate on bitcoin protocols/mining before you go spouting off unfamiliar stats.
I don’t think that answers the question. Denying transactions is certainly an issue. If it is true that the majority of mining power is in China, only a minority is outside of it. What mechanism does Bitcoin have for a minority of nodes to deny the transactions of a majority of nodes?
The "verification" nodes don't do anything to prevent censorship by miners.
The threshold isn't quite 50%+. If one of the 49% nodes mines a block with a would-be censored transaction, the censoring notes have to make an economic decision to try to mine a replacement block and then a second block on top of that to rewrite the chain. At 100% this is easy, but at just 51% it's a costly gamble that will frequently fail at a huge dollar cost.
A block costs $200k at current prices. At just over 50% of the network, you are gambling at least two blocks to force a rewrite.
You should probably better educate on bitcoin protocols/mining before you go spouting off unfamiliar stats.
†: #1)USA #2)Germany #4)France #5)Netherlands #21)China (via bitnodes.io)