Whenever I see someone talking about Bitcoin on YouTube, or Twitter, I always see that one guy in the comments who says its just a matter of time before someone hacks Bitcoin, or that it's vulnerable to hacking since it's on computers, so lets talk about what it would actually take to gain control over the network, and why it might not be so simple.
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Before we begin lets actually define what taking over Bitcoin actually means, because a website that accepts Bitcoin, or a wallet service being hacked is not the same thing as Bitcoin, being hacked and being takeover. Bitcoin is not a central system like a bank, it consists of many linked nodes, all containing a copy of every transaction ever made on Bitcoin. This ledger is the blockchain, and the blockchain is Bitcoin, and because of the way the blockchain works, which we will get into in a bit, in order to successfully hack Bitcoin, you must work faster than 50% of the network, or in economics, a 51% takeover.
So then how much is that, how much power is required to gain 51% control of the network? At the current time of writing this the hashrate of the Bitcoin network is 7,183,792,694 GH/s, meaning that if you want to hack Bitcoin you must be outputting at least that much hashing power, and you must have a source of electricity that can power all of these miners. So lets do the math:
At the time of writing this article the most powerful miner on the commercial market is the Antminer S9, which outputs about 14 TH/s new, or 14,000 GH/s. knowing this it would take about 513,000 Antminer S9 miners in order to match the network hashrate. And since each S9 costs $1295 from the manufacturer, Bitmain, the total cost of this much hardware would be about $664,335,000 US dollars, and then you must factor the cost of electricity, which at a cost of about 10 cents a day, multiplies out to about $1,687,770 a DAY. So that means that written as an equation, the cost of hacking Bitcoin would be:
$1,687,770x + $664,335,000 = y
Where 'x' is the number of days to maintain control of the network. Not exactly a cheap task.
And none of this includes cost that I couldn't calculate, like storing all these machines, cooling costs, power supplies, which I couldn't add because there are so many different options for power, and other repair and maintenance costs. Hopefully I've proved my point, thanks for reading, don't forget to upvote, and see you next time.
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