$NAT · BITCOIN'S SECURITY, TOKENIZED
THE NAT ARMORY
One link, every weapon.
Find your weapon — start from your situation
01
The Case
Start here. The thesis, interactive — read it before you argue it.
The flagship · start here
Security Budget Explorable
The security-budget cliff, interactive — the whole case in one scroll, halvings to fee gap. If you send one link, send this one.
02
The Ammo
The reply kit. Copy a link, drop the card — never argue in your own words what a card already says better.
03
The Wall
The problem, in their words — we didn't invent the security-budget question.
Sourced, verbatim statements on Bitcoin's long-term security budget — from Satoshi to peer-reviewed research. Every quote links to its live source.
STATEMENTS PER YEAR · STACKED BY WHO IS SPEAKING
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Hover a year — bars are broken down by who was speaking.
statements have a source you can open
In a few decades when the reward gets too small, the transaction fee will become the main compensation for nodes.
Translation
Satoshi Nakamoto
Once a predetermined number of coins have entered circulation, the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees and be completely inflation free.
Translation
Satoshi Nakamoto
something more like 0.5% to 1.5% of market capitalization spent on security would probably be appropriate.
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Lyn Alden
I think there is general agreement that Bitcoin's long-term thermodynamic security is an important issue that's currently up in the air with regard to sustainability.
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Jameson Lopp
Look at the whole security budget of Bitcoin, which is I think the bigger question people should be talking about with all of these miners pivoting … transaction fees were meant to compensate miners for the halving. Well, that isn't happening.
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Fred Thiel
Today power is the thing … which is why ourselves and many of our peers have pivoted, because you get a lot more money per electron if you're doing it for AI than for Bitcoin mining.
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Fred Thiel
My concern level was like a eight or ten back in 2024 … we need users, we need customers, people to use this thing … and right now nobody's really doing that.
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Nick Hansen
My answer right now, it's probably about like a five, but it edges up every year — I think within six years' time it'll be an eight.
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Mike Casey
Personally, I'm pulling out the champaign that market behaviour is indeed producing activity levels that can pay for security without inflation, and also producing fee paying backlogs needed to stabilize consensus progress as the subsidy declines.
Translation
Posted 21 Dec 2017 — the day before fees peaked at ~78% of the block reward. Within weeks they fell back to a small share.
Gregory Maxwell
the recurring, 'flow', payments to miners for running the blockchain must be large relative to the one-off, 'stock', benefits of attacking it.
Translation
Eric Budish
With only transaction fees, the variance of the block reward is very high … and it becomes attractive to fork a 'wealthy' block to 'steal' the rewards therein.
Translation
Carlsten, Kalodner, Weinberg & Narayanan
If a robust blockspace market doesn't develop, we explain why a decline in block rewards poses a substantial risk for the future.
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Hasu, James Prestwich & Brandon Curtis
Bitcoin's “security budget” is the total amount of money we pay to miners … When this value is low, 51% attacks are cheap.
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Paul Sztorc
Bitcoin's block reward is scheduled to decline to zero, raising concerns about whether the network can remain secure once miners rely solely on transaction fees.
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Junhyuk Lee
If mining is not profitable due to a high cost and low reward, miners lose their incentive and will stop mining, reducing the security of the network.
Translation
Monero Project
Monero … they put a lot of work into that tail emission and they're still regularly 51% attacked … in six years' time, another two halvings as a percentage of the total amount of emission of the coin, Bitcoin emission rate through the subsidy will actually be less than Monero's tail emission as a rate over the total amount being secured … to me, mid to longer term, this is a more important issue than quantum itself.
Translation
Mike Casey
we have a static cap on the amount of block space and it’s in no way adaptive … somebody develops a killer app … and it is wildly successful, but eventually that use case will price itself out of the market because the supply of block space does not increase ever … eventually its own weight will crush it
Translation
Mike Casey
fees are always difficult to predict, but I believe they will stay at a fundamentally low level … whenever I do financial models, I always plug in 0.35 Bitcoin per block
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Jaran Mellerud
And there is nothing that you can do to the code of Bitcoin that addresses this problem. Literally nothing.
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Will Gomez
the amount of time that we have to resolve that question is not much … two halvings from now, you’re going to have a pretty drastically reduced subsidy, that’s seven and a half years away
Translation
James O’Beirne
markets go and do what markets do based on incentives … the way mining works is that it becomes unstable when all of your revenue comes from fees … No other cryptocurrency has ever actually survived this transition.
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Peter Todd
Whether you think about the stock model or the threshold model, Bitcoin right now is probably not prepared to transition away from the issuance-led regime … So, something may have to change.
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Nic Carter
The threshold model … is that there's some level of sort of annualized security spend at which Bitcoin is safe, and, you know, the problem is that we don't really know where it is.
Translation
Nic Carter
in the absolute worst case scenario of a sustained 51% attack … If SHA256 must be abandoned, so be it. … Bitcoin could fork onto a different mining algorithm … I want to be clear, this would be a last ditch effort, and by no means guaranteed to succeed, but the simple fact this could occur may dissuade a nation state from trying such an attack.
Translation
Dan Held
There is a nuclear option here as well … it would be possible for participants in the network to say, we want to change our proof of work function … That's a nuclear option, which would be very contentious, because … that's a fundamental building block of Bitcoin.
Translation
Vijay Boyapati
Some blocks are going to be very lucrative, and some blocks are going to be relatively impoverished … when this variance increases, we concluded that a lot of the incentive alignment in Bitcoin might go haywire. Miners might be incentivized to actually go against the interest of the overall system.
Translation
Arvind Narayanan
when you combine a big debt burden with a marginally economic business, which Bitcoin mining is today, it made sense to return those miners and extinguish that debt.
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Greg Beard
to date 99% of the revenue from mining, which goes into paying for security has been the Coinbase reward. And that’s going to go to zero. … I think that’s a design flaw of Bitcoin. Fundamental design flaw.
Translation
PBJ Podcast
So in conclusion, I think we need better arguments for when Bitcoin is economically secure. And when it’s not, we need to formalize this folklore of a community response.
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Neha Narula
But the more people are seeing Bitcoin as a treasury asset, a reserve asset, something that you don't spend, it's something to save and not actually use, the fewer transaction fees are actually generated.
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Matt Crosby
Bitcoin's block subsidy is trending towards zero. It's an undeniable fact that at some point the block subsidy is going to be zero. So what's going to actually sustain and incentivize Bitcoin's on-chain security?
Translation
Matt Crosby
I think we crossover within five years. … 15 years from now, subsidy is irrelevant and it never gains relevancy again.
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Bob Burnett
There's dwindling subsidy, I think, is a big one in like medium, long term. … The security of the system is directly proportional to the fees that people want to pay.
Translation
Pieter Wuille
If that drops down to say 20 basis points, 10 basis points, maybe even lower … It's just a different system. It's a different protocol.
Translation
James McAvity
some people will say like, Oh, if hash power keeps going up, the system is more secure. And that's not strictly true. … It's all about the amount the miners are spending, right?
Translation
Jordan McKinney
The fastest one we need is just one year and to fully convert into AI. The longer ones will need to take like two or three years.
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Jihan Wu
there’s lots of different options … it’s just good to be open about the discussion and to not sort of cut it off.
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Sam Wouters
So an attacker at 26% knows for a fact that it’s going to succeed.
Translation
Ittay Eyal
Quoted on the problem — not the product. No endorsement implied. Each excerpt is a short, verbatim quotation of a published statement about Bitcoin's security budget. Inclusion here does not imply any author agrees with, or is aware of, any particular solution. Photographs identify the author of a quoted statement and are used for attribution only.