"Some Bitcoin investors mistakenly believe that an increasing hashrate alone guarantees greater security, but this overlooks a critical truth: the output of Proof-of-Work isn’t hashrate — it’s economic cost. What matters is not how many hashes are produced, but how expensive they are to produce. A growing hashrate means nothing if it’s powered by cheaper hardware or cheaper electricity. If BTC-denominated rewards drop, miners may still produce high hashrate, but with fewer incentives to stay honest. That opens the door to cheap attacks, especially if the cost of hardware or electricity falls. It’s not about how much hash you see — it’s about how costly it is to fake."


I bolded an error cheaper power alone is not enough and cheaper hash rate alone is not enough.

You need to have :
1) cheap power
2)cheap efficient gear
3)an abundance of power
4) adequate cooling lots of it.

By say cheap power or cheap gear

you paint a lessor scale of what is needed.

But you are spot on about the weakness and BTC price will only double so many times before the numbers stop working.

I estimate 2056 there will be issues. that you are talking about.

Note the quotes are for your article.

I could also pick apart the known 51% attacks.

 the ones on lesser sha 256 coins  do not count with BTC for reasons that are very obvious.

BTC has 1069 EH
BCH has  2.37 EH.   the gear is identical so the attack is easy to do.

If Chinese pools tried to attack large farms not in china can shift to usa farms or the other way around.

The attacks on ETC happened because they share the ETH  al-gore-rythm  and ETH had 100 to 1 ratio of gpus.

I do not worry much about 50% attacks at the moment> I do worry about miners stopping mining down the road and price of BTC does seem to be able to work for 20-30 years tops. time will tell.

Still reading your fix part.

I read the fix over and over and over . I will check  the natgmi.com link

Appreciate the thoughtful reply — and the sharp eye.
You're 100 % right: cheap power alone isn’t enough. You need the full stack:

cheap, abundant power
latest-gen gear (S21, S23, or better)
industrial-scale cooling
low-latency network

I oversimplified in the article but I've updated it accordingly now.

Your 2056 estimate tracks with the math. I ran BSI projections out to 2060 and at current fee growth, it’s 0.06 % by then. That’s $6 B/year defending a $100 T+ asset. Not sustainable. I worry we might see a problem much earlier though.

You’re also correct on the 51 % asymmetry: BTC  is in a different league to BCH, ETC, BTG etc
But the long-term risk isn’t a frontal 51 % attack today as much as the hashrate erosion and decentralization tomorrow.
That’s the real cliff.

If the U.S. government truly wants to rely on Bitcoin, devaluing national debt, replacing USD with BTC as global reserve then we cannot rule out such an attack. A senior Russian advisor to Putin recently warned exactly this: Trump’s plan is to back USD with Bitcoin via stablecoin treasuries. If that’s the strategy, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility for Russia, China, or others to attempt disruption. China still has a decent chunk of global hashrate and majority of ASIC production. With a bit of coordination and time, who knows. If they pulled it off, trust in Bitcoin would vanish overnight. BlackRock, Fidelity, nation-states would all reassess. We need them, whether we like it or not.

And I’m not entirely sure we could rule out a threat within the US either. If the political landscape shifts again with new administration, new priorities we get the same tools (regulation, seizure, or even quiet pressure on pools) which could be turned inward. Bitcoin’s strength is decentralization. Its vulnerability is whoever controls the marginal hashrate.

Either way, even without an attack, the future is not rosy unless we find a viable, non-consensus-changing solution. I’m puzzled how many OGs (including Bitcoin devs) brush this off with "if things get bad, someone will do something". Seriously? That’s the plan?



Fair point. Legally registered pools face lawsuits, reputational damage, and miner exodus if they go rogue. But, if a nation-state like China wants disruption, they don’t ask nicely. They pressure the pool via hardware supply, local ops, or regulatory threats. The pool doesn’t “decide” to attack; it complies or gets shut down. Reputation only matters if the state lets it survive.


It remains to be seen what happens with any token-based solution. It could go either way. Seeing AntPool, SpiderPool, and F2Pool backing it though is interesting as they aren't doing this out of altruism. They're doing it to attract users and secure their own futures. But if it works, it creates a powerful incentive loop: a more valuable token means more revenue for miners, which means a more secure hashrate, which in turn makes the network (and the token's underlying system) more valuable. It's a potential bootstrapping mechanism to solve the very economic problem we're discussing. We’ll see.

Such scenario is definitely possible. I recall certain US politician/government worker suggest to make law that force pool to exclude TX. But IMO 51% attack is something they only can do once, before miner switch to different pool in order to stop the attack that negatively affect Bitcoin price.

This is true, but we only need it to happen once to destroy the foundational trust in the system. Since Bitcoin's value is built on that very trust, this remains a critical, existential issue.

Firstly, I'm genuinely sorry to hear about your kids.

Secondly, you're right. If everything goes perfectly according to plan, it's not impossible for the price to double every halving until 2048. I admire your relaxed outlook, and I envy it, though not all of us have the 'luxury' of not being worried about the timeline.

However, I'm concerned that even if we set aside the 51% attack risk, we still face other existential threats, like miners' pivot to AI. I truly hope for all our sakes that nothing goes wrong and we're all rewarded for our foresight, patience, and wisdom. That said, I'll sleep much better if we have a working security solution in place, just in case.

My deeper fear is that this is a problem for now, not a distant future. As soon as influential investors and institutions realize these systemic risks and the current lack of a viable solution, trust could evaporate, and capital could flee. This could happen at any moment. It only takes one viral post to be seen by the right people.

Here's an example from today (and I see similar posts daily):

https://x.com/coinbureau/status/1988495046979842086?s=20

This channel for example has over 1M subscribers and is well-respected in the crypto space.

While these innovations will undoubtedly make mining cheaper and more efficient, they will also make attacking the network cheaper. This brings us back to square one: without appropriate economic safeguards, increased efficiency alone doesn't solve the security problem; it just changes the cost basis for everyone, including bad actors.

This is why I included the BSI metric in my article. Think of it this way:

The US has a GDP of ~$29T and protects it with a ~$1T security budget (military, etc.), representing about 3.4% of GDP.

Bitcoin has a market cap of ~$2T and is protected by a ~$10B security budget (miner revenue), representing about 0.5% of its market cap.

Based on your own price projections, that security budget would fall to 0.025% by 2028 and 0.0125% by 2032 and so on. I accept it's not a direct comparison and I'm making assumptions (like the price doubling), but it clearly illustrates the escalating security deficit we're facing.


That's a really interesting thought experiment about slowing down the halving cycle. You've correctly identified the core problem: the security budget needs to last.

The challenge is that the 10-minute block time is deeply baked into Bitcoin's security and consensus model. Moving to 20 minutes would significantly increase the risk of chain reorganizations and make the network less secure and much slower to confirm transactions, without actually increasing the block size or transaction capacity.

It would delay the security cliff, but it wouldn't solve it. The ultimate solution still has to be the same: building an ecosystem where on-chain settlement is so valuable that fees can fully support the miners. Your idea highlights just how important it is that we find a solution for that. This is precisely why I'm interested in developments like the NAT token. It's designed specifically to create that valuable on-chain settlement layer, providing a secondary subsidy to miners by tokenizing Bitcoin's own block data without changing a thing for Bitcoin.