I should point out that my MIL is a completely apolitical person who worked in the Chinese government for her entire career, spending most of that time just helping poor people, without a shred of corruption. She has nothing to worry about, doesn't care about politics, and even she's paranoid about this.
On websites which out of censorship though, is another story, of course.
Japanese forums have been raided by Chinese trolls in the past. Now the Japanese just post a statement about Tienanmen square and poof, no more Chinese attendance, as the Great Firewall starts blocking...
Interesting times.
Currently BTC.COM[1] and AntPool[2] combined make up 42.5% of the network and both are both owned by Bitmain, a company headquartered in Beijing.
ViaBTC[3] is also a Chinese mining company operating out of Shenzhen and has 10.1%. I'm not going to bother checking the rest since that's already 52.6% of the network controlled by 2 companies under 1 authoritarian regime.
[0] https://blockchain.info/pools
[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BTC.com
How this could seem to anyone in power a good idea- i will never know.
This starts Orwellian and end Huxleyan, in that a generation or two in, the majority of people's perception will be altered. They have no access to dissenting thought and their critical thinking skills are as dull as a doorknob.
This is about thought control.
After all, we have a "karma score" here on HN and we think it's great... in part, presumably, because it's opt-in and it doesn't follow you around.
Is there a middle ground? As in, an identity service that offers this kind of "trustworthiness score" across services but it's opt-in and you can have as many "identities" as you'd like. You could use a high-trust real-name identity with certain online accounts like banks but also have the ability to use throw-away identities for anonymous browsing and commenting? If such an identity protocol included some kind of cryptographic chain of proof as a way to validate the trustworthiness, it could be quite useful.
(see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16919952)
Update: my account has just been throttled and I cannot make further comments:/
Which has a concept of "social score".
One might object that no sane people would allow this, but we're already allowing mass surveillance. After 9/11 we allowed legislation that is basically one massive infringement of privacy. All it'd take is gradual implementation and some kind of "starter event".
Of course , Social Credit score has no place in western liberal democracies but maybe Social Credit score is not a bad idea for developing countries where ignorant people outnumber educated people ,where depraved medieval traditions still hold sway.
The rich and powerful in China have nothing to fear from this.
