I'm part of a team of developers looking into reissuing Bitcoin with a hard fork that includes merged mining. We're curious if it's feasible to limit mining on our blockchain to just one country. Basically, can we prevent miners from other countries from participating?
No, you can not. Certainly not for the real Bitcoin network. Maybe for your network that you could attain due to the hard fork.
I suggest you try to understand more about the Bitcoin network and how decentralized it is. Even if you try to convenience some of the mining pools to collaborate with you, which I am pretty sure you know is near to impossible, miners can still do solo mining minus using those mining pools.
Seriously mate, you sound like the fat guy who runs his country like a god, builds nukes for nothing and hate when people listen to music from their next door country.
Bitcoin is decentralized for F*** sake, if you dont want to mine with the rest of the world, build your own shitcoin and promote it like those scamstars in the "altcoins" section of the forum.
What do you mean by reissuing bitcoin through hard fork with merge mining?
Bitcoin network of nodes and miners are decentralized in a way you can mine bitcoin and contribute to the network from any country without no restrictions.
I see these as a useless question.
Hahahahahaha. Aww man. The public is so brutal. Althought I'm laughing on the outside. I'm crying on the inside.
Pardon. The original concept was a USA-native coin, That way, wherever it goes, it can be traced back to America with an American paper trail- better protecting owners from scams and theft and legitimizing any wallet and any currency it comes into contact with, providing extra security to banks and financial systems- sure it can be converted to Ethereum in Tornado Cash and used for bad things- but anyone whose wallet doesn't contain a bit of USA-native coin might be a terrorist or criminal hiding from law enforcement. It's everybody's duty to themselves to legitimize their wallet with some USA-native coin.
I thought it was a good idea... no?
It sounds similar with how bank works.
It sounds like "Guilty until proven innocent", which trying force everyone to use such coin.
Personally i don't see it as good idea.
It's theoretically possible if you perform hard-fork which change how Bitcoin is issued or reissued. But unless majority of Bitcoin community agree with the change, you only create altcoin.
That is a whole different story but as ABCbits said - you would be creating a new altcoin with no connection to BTC.
The only way to keep it based on BTC would be to make a USA-based pool and restrict it to only miners with a US IP address. That way when the pool finds a block the coinbase reports the finder as your US-based pool and your distribution of the rewards+fees would show they went to US-based miners. Your tracking of where your users send their coins is of course ends there but at least their origin can be traced to the USA.
Only problem with that is that there would be very few users. Mega farms like MARA et al have their gear housed in the US but ar already in a sense solo mining & offering hosting for Institutions mining on their 'pool'. End result is that again the BTC rewards are directly linked to them.
While the idea is pure censorship and is stupid, it is doable, you just need to alter the consensus of the protocol to accept only X country IPs, it is fairly easy to know the country of which the block was originated from.
Obviously, that could be avoided by a few means such as:
1- The use of VPN/VPS
2- The actual miner that sits in Y country would send the block hash to the accepted country X and X would propagate it to the network and it would be accepted.
You will have to run a fully KYCed ecosystem to control it, otherwise, it is just a waste of time and money.