How much does it cost to destroy Bitcoin? (educational)
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How much does it cost to destroy Bitcoin? (educational)
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> There has been a dreaded myth surrounding the so-called 51% PoW attacks against Bitcoin since inception. It is often believed that anyone able and willing to spend an amount equal to the “security budget” forever can destroy Bitcoin. That is, any evil government willing to spend about $60 million per day (matching miner’s revenue) would be able to destroy its $1.16 trillion current market capitalization. And worse, this figure may become lower and lower as halvings come if fee revenue is not able to take off consistently. Note that “forever” is just a credible threat, he will only need to spend that money for a period of time long enough until Bitcoin has been destroyed, which may be just a few weeks (at $420 million per week).
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> Here I will try to explain why the mentioned figure (currently 0.005% of bitcoin’s mcap per day) is not nearly enough to destroy Bitcoin, and show why it is unlikely that an attacker would carry such an ineffective attack for a long period of time. […]
tldr; Bitcoin’s value is not dependent on others’ judgement, who could suddenly change their minds, giving an impression of fragility. Bitcoin consensus is not driven by miners and neither consensus nor the value of each coin arise from a process of deliberation among big companies or influenceable users running a full node. The market determines what chain represents the most valuable UTXO set.
*This summary is auto generated by a bot and not meant to replace reading the original article. As always, DYOR.*