Sabotaging Bitcoin

https://blog.dshr.org/2025/12/sabotaging-bitcoin.html

by zdw • 7 months ago

203 205 7 months ago

blog.dshr.org

gerdesj2• 7 months ago

TIL: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci - quite horrifying!

EDIT: For comparison: https://gridwatch.co.uk/

kfrzcode2• 7 months ago

Meanwhile, Hedera remains carbon negative and 7 orders of magnitude more efficient than Bitcoin.

"Today, Hedera is performing the equivalent of over 10,000,000 transactions and 788,000 transactions for the same amount of energy it takes Bitcoin and Ethereum to process 1, respectively."

[0] https://hedera.com/blog/going-carbon-negative-at-hedera-hash... [1]: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10160701/

wslh• 7 months ago

Databases either?

ShowalkKama• 7 months ago

I find extremely funny that I came across this spammy comment while sitting on a vulnerability in their code because my attempts of contacting them have been unsuccessful

oofbey2• 7 months ago

Everything is orders of magnitude more efficient than bitcoin.

Zaskoda3• 7 months ago

What this site does not show is how much of the power used to maintain the network is waste power such as gas that's normally burned off at the well site or hydro electric that goes to waste.

Unlike AI, there's a strong incentive to find the cheapest electricity possible. Because that's what everyone else is doing. With Bitcoin, you now exactly what your costs are and what your yields are. There's a clear threshold, when power in an area becomes too expensive there's no reason left to mine.

AI, on the other hand, is a bet on the future - infinite gains. No matter how much power costs, it's worth it to keep using as much as possible. We can't know how much power AI uses. Unlike Bitcoin, there aren't any metrics from which to extrapolate. But we do know that AI uses more power than Bitcoin already. We just have no idea how much more.

fragmede• 7 months ago

gas that's normally burned off at the well site

Funny thing about that. Civilized governments put a stop to that, by fining flare-offs to make it economical to not do that.

cyberax• 7 months ago

What this site does not show is how much of the power used to maintain the network is waste power such as gas that's normally burned off at the well site or hydro electric that goes to waste.

WTF? Hydro is rarely wasted because it's so dispatchable. Typically, it can only happen during high water seasons. Same for the gas power plants.

Unlike AI, there's a strong incentive to find the cheapest electricity possible.

Like coal.

bb882• 7 months ago

We can't know how much power AI uses.

I call shenanigans on this statement. We can and most certainly can tell how much power AI is using. The upper bound is the total datacenter usage.

oofbey2• 7 months ago

BTC enthusiasts have very creative arguments for why their currency isn’t the a complete disaster for the climate. Like pointing fingers.

johnnienaked4• 7 months ago

And what does sucking up all that low cost electricity to waste on a frivolity do to the price of electricity in general?

Cmon you remember supply and demand right

bujkopl3• 7 months ago

Since when is incentivizing low cost renewable energy horrifying?

gerdesj2• 7 months ago

My first link shows that Bitcoin consumes roughly 40GW and my second link shows that the UK roughly does too.

There are a lot of ifs and buts here ... but the amount of power used to support the BT mechanism worldwide is roughly the same as the power consumption of the entirety of the UK.

D13Fd• 7 months ago

Because every unit of electricity causes climate change and burns resources (even renewable sources of electricity - they just burn them slower). From a societal point of view we are dumping huge amounts of electricity and resources into a hole to accomplish nothing that couldn’t be accomplished with a database and a trusted third party at a billionth of the cost (or less).

The vast majority of transactions are speculation on what other people might pay for a bitcoin (i.e., a line on a spreadsheet). And even then, that speculation and trading often occurs on secondary markets which rely on trusted third parties - thus rendering the entire ordeal even more pointless.

rcxdude5• 7 months ago

Bitcoin cares not for how much energy it uses, just how valuable the energy it uses is. This does not make more energy available to anyone else or reduce the price.

utopiah3• 7 months ago

Well what's arguably even more horrifying is according to "Estimated average energy efficiency of bitcoin mining hardware" no significant changed happened since 2014. I imagine we went from CPU to GPU to ASIC in couple of years and now for more than a decade, no change, just more.

tenuousemphasis2• 7 months ago

I'm not sure what data you looking at but we went from 8300 J/TH in 2014 to 33.4 J/TH in 2023. So... what are you talking about?

rcxdude5• 7 months ago

Well, improved energy efficiency just means more hashes/s and the difficulty adjusting. There's nothing to be gained in terms of the security or efficiency of the network as a whole by making the hardware faster, it's only good for whoever makes and uses that hardware.

will5421• 7 months ago

Is it illegal to attack cryptocurrency?

qgin• 7 months ago

If crypto needs legal protection from attacks, I think that would invalidate most of its value proposition.

dboreham• 7 months ago

Definitely reduces the cost of consensus though.

Lerc• 7 months ago

That seems to be a reasonable position. I'm kind-of comfortable with the position of bitcoin as being large enough to attract significant attacks, but not so dominant that a catestrophic failure of the system would have significant global impact.

I have nothing against bitcoin being the money of the future, but if it is to become that, this is the sort of trial by fire that it should endure.

wmf• 7 months ago

The attack described in this article might violate CFTC market manipulation regulations.

anonym29• 7 months ago

IANAL, but from my understanding, the primary law used to prosecute hacking is the CFAA's broad "without authorization" and "exceeding authorized access" clauses.

That said, authorization implies an entity with ownership rights granting some kind of limited license to others to interact with the owner's property.

For a permissionless decentralized network with no owner, where the attack is against the consensus of which chain is valid, I'd have a hard time arguing that "authorization" as a concept is even applicable or relevant.

As wmf suggested, market manipulation laws may still apply, but I'm not sure traditional CFAA "without authorization" / "exceeding authorized access" hacking charges could apply, though I'd be willing to bet a prosecutor could make a case for wire fraud - a scheme to defraud using interstate communications.

OJFord• 7 months ago

Depending on the currency, it's celebrated. (Code is law, etc.)

Etheryte• 7 months ago

That says nothing about actual legality though, just like how me saying I am the law doesn't make me the king of the world.

fancyfredbot• 7 months ago

You will probably end up in court. But you might not get convicted.

Shakeeb Ahmed was convicted of wire fraud for exploiting a smart contract bug.

Avi Eisenberg was also convicted for exploiting a smart contract bug, but he had his conviction overturned on appeal.

The Peraire-Bueno brothers were in court for exploiting a bug in the MEV mechanism but it ended in a mis-trial so we're going to have to wait to find out.

Not legal advice ;-)

OutOfHere2• 7 months ago

The answer to this problem is in the original Bitcoin whitepaper itself. It gives the formula for the required number of confirmations.

The Monero PoW community has had to deal with such nonsense, as have other smaller PoW coins.

With ε=1e-3, the expected number of 6 confirmations works only so long as the largest pool size does not exceed 12%. For a pool size of 30%, at least 24 confirmations should be required in Bitcoin, but 49 in Monero with its stricter ε=1e-6. You can see the table and the math at https://gist.github.com/impredicative/0907e1699f5ff97a9fed5d... and again it's all cleanly reproducible from the whitepaper. Anyone who is still requiring only 6 confirmations then will be setting themselves up for a risk of reversal.

dmurray• 7 months ago

TFA observes that it would be disruptive and socially difficult to move systems to expect requiring 24 confirmations, and expresses relief that other responses are possible.

Perhaps this is more suitable as a response over months or years to a long-term shift in the composition of Bitcoin miners than as a short-term measure when it appears that someone has suddenly acquired 30% of mining capacity today.

OutOfHere2• 7 months ago

Yes: "Not aligning with reality is disruptive." Some lessons have to be learned the hard way if they're not learned the soft way. The problem is not reality.

rationalist• 7 months ago

Bitcoin has a block/confirmation approximately every 10 minutes, and Monero every 2 minutes.

So 240 minutes for Bitcoin, and 98 minutes for Monero.

So even though Monero is more strict, it is still "faster".

Stevvo• 7 months ago

Before the AI bubble, Bitmain was only worth ~$1 billion. Now they are worth ~15, because they make chips for AI also. Either way, you could buy bitmain for the budget mentioned in the attack if it were for sale. Or bitmain could pull off the attack, if indeed they do "control ... all the major mining pools" as the article alleges.

But who ultimately controls Bitmain? The Chinese state.

So, by extension, bitcoin is controlled by the CCP.

What a shitshow. Crypto needs to move on from bitcoin already, pick something better... anything better. There are so many options, and bitcoin is the worst of all of them.

TheAmazingRace• 7 months ago

Too many people have a vested interest in keeping Bitcoin going for as long as possible, sadly. It's going to take a massive black swan of some kind to shake their faith.

Heck, they can embed CSAM into the Bitcoin blockchain and that won't stop anyone from using it, because above all else, line must go up.

beenBoutIT6• 7 months ago

Like it or not in the end it will just be BTC. China will stop exporting Bitcoin mining tech. Nation States will dump money into proprietary BTC mining tech and keep it to themselves just like military tech. The US needs to see this reality and focus on domestic BTC mining tech like the future depends on it.

hackernudes• 7 months ago

It comes down to semiconductor manufacturing, not ASIC design. Taiwan, Korea, USA are still on top.

oblio• 7 months ago

LOL. The Sam Altman plan. Or the US could just put Bitcoin on the Entities List and forbid any US citizen and any US owned entity from investing or trading Bitcoin and Bitcoin derived financial instruments, probably force 25% or more of the Bitcoin money to pull out, crater Bitcoin value, and not perpetuate this atrocity against nature and humanity.

"Democratizing finance" my a**.

fruitworks2• 7 months ago

why? the easy solution is to let china monopolize bitcoin mining, and the value of bitcoin crashes. then the USD will stand unopposed and the chinese will end up with a bunch of useless equipmemt

roenxi2• 7 months ago

The Eyal & Sirer paper is pretty interesting - they basically point out that there is actually some game theory involved in when miners should reveal that they mined a block to compete most effectively with their fellows. If a pool can set up a situation where they mine a block and wait X seconds to reveal it, they can force other miners to waste X seconds of has power and gain an advantage.

It looks like a result with complex implications - eg, maybe making it impossible for new miners to set up unless they have a meaningful advantage in operating costs instead of just parity with the entrenched players. It is hard to tell because market reality is a mess but if there is a meaningful strategic choice to be made beyond simply announcing a block when it is mined then there is a lot of room for weird equilibriums even if the paper's specific analysis turns out to have flaws.

mvkel• 7 months ago

Isn't this the same thing as saying "if everyone just agrees that a dollar bill is actually just a piece of paper, USD becomes worthless"? Albeit at a smaller scale

ycombinatrix2• 7 months ago

I don't think it is the same thing. Everyone agrees that mining the next block is valuable.

palata16• 7 months ago

That's a good question, but it is different. The equivalent would be "if everyone just agrees that a bitcoin is worth nothing, then it is worth nothing".

I don't know if I have a good comparison here, but maybe something like "if the bank keeps your money for a little longer before validating your transaction, they can use your money for a little longer and make more money from it". Of course if your bank says that a transaction takes 1 year, you will go to another bank. But if they say it takes a day...

copirate20• 7 months ago

If a pool can set up a situation where they mine a block and wait X seconds to reveal it, they can force other miners to waste X seconds of has power and gain an advantage.

How is it wasted if they work on the current chain? If they find a block during those X seconds, they'll propagate it before the waiting pool does. The waiting pool will then just lose the revenue from the block they put on hold. They're the ones wasting mining time when that happens, while the others never do.

RealityVoid• 7 months ago

Right, but the odds of this happening is small(ish) - I'm certain there is a sweet spot for witholding time. If they don't find a block within the time interval, then effectively all the work for that time is "wasted" by the other participants since it could not have been put on the chain anyway AND the witholder has a headstart of a couple of seconds searching for a new block.

yellow_lead• 7 months ago

I might be wrong but I think it's like this..

A finds a block after 1 minute, then powers off and waits for another minute. They reveal the block after 2 minutes.

B searches for the block for 2 minutes.

After 2 minutes, A has used 1 minute of their compute, and B has used 2.

emil-lp• 7 months ago

If you mine a block without revealing it, not only are you the only one that can mine the next block after that, but everyone is mining on the "wrong head". There's of course the risk that someone finds a different head in the meantime, but otherwise, you waste competitors' resources, while you get an advantage on the next block.

jcfrei2• 7 months ago

Take a look at the recently mined blocks. there are some miners that very frequently mine two blocks within quick succession, like just now for example: Block 930256: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/blocks/btc/930256 Followed by block 930257: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/blocks/btc/930257 The second block is usually almost empty.

Bootvis2• 7 months ago

This can have another explanation as well: the moment a block is found, the miner starts building on top of the previous block but hasn't constructed a new full block of transactions yet as that costs a bit of time to calculate and distribute. In this period, a new block could be found.

spir• 7 months ago

This is good analysis. The main longitudinal aspect omitted is that the profitability of the attack goes up as long as the price of BTC doesn't double or more each halving.

In ~6 more years, Bitcoin will undergo two more halvings, so if the price of BTC is not ~400k by then, then attack will have become more feasible.

beenBoutIT6• 7 months ago

In the near future every nation state will be vying for the largest stake of the BTC mining pie and the BTC race will be bigger than the Space Race and the Nuclear Arms Race combined and adjusted for inflation.

UltraSane8• 7 months ago

Why? BTC is not just worthless, it has negative value due to how much electricity it takes to securely mine new blocks.

fruitworks2• 7 months ago

why

bujkopl3• 7 months ago

This article is FUD. No one is spending $30B+ for an attack that gasp extends the required confirmations to a few hours until a re-org can be achieved and accounts settled.

In fact, wiping out the derivative markets would be seen as a net-postive by most individual hodlers.

comradesmith2• 7 months ago

I believe the article reached the same conclusion you did

nativeit2• 7 months ago

You forgot to do your own research and read the article.

w10-1• 7 months ago

TIL the scale of bitcoin derivatives in 2020 (hence volatility): ~2T on 2B market activity. Jeepers!

--- Starting in late 2020, as shown in The Economist's graphic, the spot market in Bitcoin became dwarfed by the derivatives markets. In the last month $1.7T of Bitcoin futures traded on unregulated exchanges, and $6.4B on regulated exchanges. Compare this with the $1.8B of the spot market in the same month. ---

onion2k2• 7 months ago

Why would you expect the scale of the derivatives to be related to the scale of the spot market, especially if the derivatives are cash-settled futures? One is basically gambling on the price of BTC going up or down, and the other is trading the actual BTC, right?

phonicwheel• 7 months ago

How is trading the actual BTC not also gambling on the price of BTC going up or down?

Turneyboy• 7 months ago

Well for one with a gigantic derivatives market compared to the underlying one it becomes relatively cheap to manipulate the underlying market.

If you can make a gigantic bet on the price going up and then buy a large amount of Bitcoin that moves the price up you can win from that. See the Jane street India derivatives market issue.

rcxdude5• 7 months ago

I dunno, ask India and Jane Street. That's the same basic situation: when the derivative market betting on the price going up or down is much larger than the market that actually sets that price, it's ripe for arbitrage/market manipulation by a player big enough to move the market (which one you think it is depends on whether you're one of the gamblers getting fleeced or the one taking their money).

spectralista• 7 months ago

Because at that scale, the tail is wagging the dog and it is not even close.

UltraSane8• 7 months ago

Bitcoin is the least efficient technology ever created. There is no limit to how much electricity it can consume just to handle 7 transactions per second. No matter HOW much electricity it uses this value will never increase.

hggh• 7 months ago

This solution to this issue is extremely simple, but I bet it will never be implemented in Bitcoin BTC. That's one of the reasons why it forked in 1 August 2017.

rlpb• 7 months ago

There is a limit. The cost of electricity required is bounded by the value of the reward (block reward plus transaction fees). The value of the reward is bounded too, since the "import" of electricity into the Bitcoin economy is inflationary.

UltraSane8• 7 months ago

Then making the block reward halve every 4 years is a pretty strange decision.

sebbyBinx• 7 months ago

Part of this post addresses the economics of creating a 6 block re-org. This makes sense as 6-confimations is the standard for Bitcoin finality today.

However, as Bitcoin's security inevitably weakens over the coming years due to diminishing miner rewards (denominated in BTC), I believe this "6-confimation" acceptance policy will change to include not only the number of confirmations, but the timing of those confirmations as well. Consider a scenario where an exchange deciding whether a tx with 6-confirmations that took 4 hours to arrive (this happens occasionally) is safe to consider finalized/settled. Even though 6-confimations may be considered safe by today's acceptance policies, this tx would still have a high probability of double spend due to the assumed 4-hour long wait for the 6 confirmations (as the attacker would have 4 hours to produce 7 blocks instead of the normal/expected 1 hour). Instead of ignoring block interarrival timing, it may make sense to include block timing as part of an acceptance policy.

So, going forward Bitcoin acceptance policies may change from today's 6-confirmation standard to something more complicated that involves the amount of time those blocks took to arrive. This would significantly enhance Bitcoin's double spending resistance without adding/altering any code and may give the network a much needed security boost in the coming years to prevent the attack discussed in the post.

mrb2• 7 months ago

"Bitcoin's security inevitably weakens over the coming years due to diminishing miner rewards (denominated in BTC)"

That's incorrect. Security scales with USD-denominated rewards, not BTC-denominated. And there are 16 years of real-world data showing they have been generally increasing, so a healthy sign that the Bitcoin experiment is working:

https://newhedge.io/bitcoin/block-reward-per-block

And not only that, but rewards are still expected to stabilize even when measured in BTC (thereby not relying on an increase of BTC's price) as they are progressively composed more and more of tx fees instead of newly mined BTC.

It's puzzling to me why some still don't understand the systemic incentives that make all this work as it has for 16 years and counting...

free_bip• 7 months ago

How are you so confident that it will never weaken? Especially since there will come a time when the block reward is literally 0.

officialchicken2• 7 months ago

It's puzzling to me why some still don't understand the systemic incentives...

Then I guess you're the type who will be really surprised to learn that with diminishing rewards comes increasing consolidation.

... that make all this work as it has for 16 years and counting...

That's convenient way to memory hole the market flash crashes, network forks, the blocks mined without consensus, and everything bad that happened over that timeframe.

copirate20• 7 months ago

If the attacker is waiting for a lucky event to occur (finding more blocks than others while having less than 51% of the mining power) it means that they are constantly wasting mining time. That in itself is a huge cost (operational cost and block rewards thrown away), but it also means that they can't predict when it will happen. A double spend attack must be planned in advance because the first transaction must occur at the beginning of the attack. I'm not sure how they could constantly try double spends without risking losing the money each time the attack doesn't happen.

I don't see how it could be profitable. If it can't be profitable, then the risk of someone doing it is pretty low. If they already have the necessary hardware, they'd be much better off mining.

Majromax2• 7 months ago

I'm not sure how they could constantly try double spends without risking losing the money each time the attack doesn't happen.

If you're not trying to profit from the double spend itself but rather from a collapse following a proven double-spend, you can double-spend the bitcoins to yourself.

ur-whale• 7 months ago

However, as Bitcoin's security inevitably weakens over the coming years due to diminishing miner rewards (denominated in BTC),

Says you, without a hint of a rationale backing your argument.

It seems to me that the historical hashing rate curve tells a different story.

And block rewards have been diminishing regularly (and very predictably) pretty much since day one.

tromp• 7 months ago

The hashing rate is not directly relevant. That's roughly proportional to the daily dollar value of the reward times the efficiency of the leading mining hardware. The latter has gone up many orders of magnitude over the years.

block rewards have been diminishing regularly

That's exactly what the poster you're replying to argued; the BTC denominated block subsidy halves every 4 years, and so without a corresponding doubling in price, the bitcoin security budget keeps diminishing, at least until tx fees start to dominate the subsidy.

nathias• 7 months ago

you can accept bitcoin at any confirmation you want, it isn't a policy

coldcity_again• 7 months ago

in bitcoin terminology it is actually called policy rather than consensus, meaning you can choose your own config and still meet consensus rules.

_heimdall4• 7 months ago

This would significantly enhance Bitcoin's double spending resistance without adding/altering any code

I would have expected such security rules are part of the miner code, no? Don't they need to consider rules related to the comparative security level of a chain when decided which chain to follow when multiple exist?

bellajbadr• 7 months ago

you can wipe out Russia with thousands of nuclear bomb

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Sabotaging Bitcoin

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