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Comment by bmcusick | Hacker News Reader

> If the world's economies ran on bitcoin we would need a stupendous amount of energy to keep the miners running.

You've misunderstood something about Bitcoin if you think this is true. Bitcoin miners use resources based on the logic of competing with each other for the value of the mining reward, not based on the number of transactions they process. If Bitcoin solved all its scaling problems so that everyone in the world could use Bitcoin, but mining rewards remained constant, the resources the miners expend to collect the reward wouldn't be any different from today.

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I think you're underestimating the issue with attackers, if the world ran on bitcoin, attacking it becomes much more attractive, so use must indeed use more energy. It must use enough to make attacking bitcoin very unattractive.

No, sorry, that's not how Bitcoin works either. If the whole world used Bitcoin and the market cap of Bitcoin was over a trillion dollars, a 51% attacker could still only double-spend its own transactions. As long a public key crypto is secure, you cannot just re-write arbitrary Bitcoin balances into your own wallet even if you had 100% of the mining power. Therefore the incentive to attack Bitcoin is only as big as your own Bitcoin holdings, not the value of the entire market cap.

>> Therefore the incentive to attack Bitcoin is only as big as your own Bitcoin holdings, not the value of the entire market cap.

That's not quite true though is it? They could certainly (for instance) block transactions and generally hold the whole thing to ransom.

You're right, it doesn't have the financial incentive that you could (for instance) steal coin, but you could potentially block all transactions that don't have a considerable fee, for you, or just break stuff. Motives to do that will become more pressing the higher value the network is to nation states.

It is already attractive enough for all the hackers in the world to try. And they do. The underlying technology is secure.

As it grows it becomes more attractive for more powerful and richer actors, and even state actors.

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