@drakefjustin: Bitcoin PoW security is a ticking time bomb, fees at 13-year low

The security of Bitcoin PoW is a ticking time bomb. Bitcoin fees are at a 13-year low—less than 10 BTC/day. Despite 2016, 2020, 2024 halvings, miner revenue from fees is at a 9-year low—just 1%. low fees → low security budget → low security Bitcoin's security model is broken. If Bitcoin gets taken over, the fallout could take the entire crypto ecosystem with it. The systemic risks can't be ignored. Below is the 30d moving average of daily transaction volume: now at 6.5 BTC/day, less than the past 13 years. The story that fees will increase as a fraction of the security budget is not holding up. For a decade now BTC fees have decreased faster than issuance. Below is the 90d moving average of the security budget contribution from fees. Fees halvened alongside issuance: → Mar 2016: 25 BTC/block, 1% from fees → Mar 2020: 12.5 BTC/block, 1% from fees → Apr 2022: 6.25 BTC/block, 1% from fees → Apr 2025: 3.125 BTC/block, still 1% from fees Imagine fees were the only source of miner revenue today: → revenue drops 100x → hashing infra decreases 100x → 1% of today's infra (1 large farm) can 51% attack Bitcoin That's the trajectory we're on. The 21M cap breaks security, it's self-destructive. It should be clear now Satoshi made an ooopsie. As BTC price rises it gets harder to sustain high BTC-denominated fees. Today's 6.5 BTC/day may become 1 BTC/day if BTC goes to $1M or $10M. Let's be optimistic and say BTC rises to $1M and today's 6.5 BTC/day in fees is maintained: → $6.5M/day in fees → 10% of today's security budget Bitcoin would be a $20T asset secured by 1/10th of today's hashing infrastructure. Today Bitcoin is secured by 20 GW—the equivalent of 10M space heaters. A 90% cut in miner revenue would bring that down to 2 GW of security—1M space heaters. For context, Texas alone produces 80 GW. There's no way a $20T asset can be secured by 2 GW. Let's dream big and assume BTC goes to $10M per coin. Bitcoin would be a $200T asset—all fiat, all stocks, all gold; combined. Is it secure then? → 6.5 BTC/day is $65M/day → same security budget as today → same 20 GW of security as today Sounds secure until you calculate the cost of attack. 1 GW of hashing infrastructure costs $1B: → $500M for datacenters (land, power, cooling) → $500M for rigs (e.g. 50M TH/s; $10 per TH/s; 20J/TH) So what would a permanent 51% attack cost? → $20B for 20GW of hashing infra → 0.01% of BTC's hypothetical $200T marketcap Meanwhile today there's $43B of BTC perp open interest, which is 2% of BTC's marketcap. Getting 0.01% marketcap short exposure is trivial today, and will only get easier as BTC financialises. $10M per BTC won't secure Bitcoin either. Bottom line: Bitcoin's PoW model is not sustainable. The maths is against it. Without a fix someone will break it. Can fees magically grow 100x? Maybe. But so far every attempt to produce transactional utility on Bitcoin has failed to drive sustained fee volume. Counterparty, Rootstock, Liquid, Lightning, Omni, Stacks, Ordinals, Babylon—you name it—only produced short-lived fee spikes. Is BitVM a solution? Bridges relying on it can be drained by 51% attacks. One step forward, two steps back. Covenants or OP_CAT? Maybe, but highly speculative. I witnessed a STARK verified on an OP_CAT testnet—a multi-block monstrosity. If fees don't magically grow orders of magnitude there are two candidate solutions: 1) add tail issuance, remove the 21M limit 2) switch to proof-of-stake Both "solutions" seem to be cultural non-starters. Also tail issuance only works proactively, not after a 51% takeover. Some suggest that Proof-of-authority (PoA) with mining pools could secure Bitcoin. What does that even mean? A multisig controlled by Foundry, AntPool, P2Pool? If you believe PoA could secure the future of money, the burden is on you to explain in detail how that would work. Bitcoin is meant to be antifragile. Yet the elephant in the room in the room is not being addressed. We can burry our in heads in the sand. But the fundamentals are getting louder. Tick tock, next block—boom.