{"id":42473,"date":"2025-08-15T23:01:43","date_gmt":"2025-08-15T23:01:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=42473"},"modified":"2025-08-15T23:01:43","modified_gmt":"2025-08-15T23:01:43","slug":"looming-bitcoin-security-budget-crisis-is-fake-expert-buries-fud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=42473","title":{"rendered":"Looming Bitcoin Security Budget Crisis Is Fake \u2014 Expert Buries FUD"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Pierre Rochard, VP of Research at Riot Platforms, one of the largest publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies and CEO of The Bitcoin Bond Company says the most persistent narrative about Bitcoin\u2019s long-term security\u2014an alleged \u201cbudget shortfall\u201d as block subsidies decline\u2014is built on a category error. In a series of posts<\/a> on X today, August 15, he argues that critics conflate the rules of Bitcoin with the economics of settlement finality, and in doing so miss how the fee market, user controls, miner competition, and difficulty adjustments interact to raise the cost of attacks precisely when it matters.<\/p>\n

Bitcoin\u2019s Security Budget Problem Is Solved<\/h2>\n

\u201cBitcoin\u2019s \u2018security budget\u2019 is often framed by altcoiners as a looming shortfall as block subsidies halve,\u201d Rochard wrote. \u201cThat framing mixes two different things. The rules of Bitcoin (eg 21 million cap<\/a>, validity of transactions, block weight limits) are secured by full nodes and private keys. Miners don\u2019t set or change those rules; they only propose blocks that fit within them. What mining buys is settlement finality: how costly it is to censor or reorder recent blocks.\u201d The question, in his view, is not whether a fixed pot of money exists to pay for security, but whether the network can make reorgs and censorship uneconomic as the subsidy shrinks.<\/p>\n

He rejects the notion\u2014common in cross-chain comparisons\u2014that Bitcoin\u2019s \u201csecurity budget\u201d is a static paycheck. \u201cContrary to what Ethereum influencers claim, Bitcoin\u2019s budget for finality is NOT a fixed paycheck; it\u2019s a market price that rises when needed.\u201d When marginal miners shut off after a halving, blocks slow temporarily and difficulty adjusts. When confirmations become scarce or unreliable, fee rates climb as users compete for inclusion.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt 1,000 sats\/vB across ~1,000,000 vB, a single block\u2019s fees are about 10 BTC\u2014often more than the subsidy,\u201d he noted, pointing back to \u201cfee blow-offs in 2017 and 2021, and in May 2023 multiple blocks where fees alone exceeded the subsidy.\u201d In practice, he says, miners \u201crespond by filling blocks to capture those fees, not by leaving money on the table.\u201d<\/p>\n

A large part of Rochard\u2019s case is that users are not passive. Tools like Replace-By-Fee and Child-Pays-For-Parent allow wallets and receivers to \u201crebroadcast transactions with higher fees or attach a high-fee child to an unconfirmed parent, instantly elevating inclusion priority.\u201d That routing of rewards, he argues, \u201cconcentrates [them] on blocks that confirm parents and makes omitted transactions a bounty for whichever miner defects from any censoring or undercutting strategy.\u201d Mining pool competition operationalizes the game theory: \u201cwhen fees are rich and visible, each pool has a dominant incentive to defect first and claim them now, collapsing any cartel that tries to suppress or sequence transactions for nefarious purposes.\u201d<\/p>\n

If attacks persist, he adds, receivers can raise the number of confirmations required for high-value transfers, stretching the attacker\u2019s time and energy budget while urgent senders bid up fees to start the clock immediately. \u201cThese logical user-side controls ensure that any sustained attack must burn growing resources against rising rewards for the honest chain.\u201d His synthesis: \u201cnodes lock the rules; difficulty adjustments re-equilibrate participation; the fee market prices scarce blockspace on demand; RBF\/CPFP and mining pool competition route revenue to the parent-confirming chain; and confirmation policy dials assurance as high as needed.\u201d<\/p>\n

From his perspective, the empirical record\u2014\u201cfee spikes during stress, miners maximizing fee inclusion, and rapid reversion to normal once backlogs clear\u201d\u2014already demonstrates the dynamic. \u201cAs subsidy declines, fees don\u2019t have to be permanently high; they need to be responsive when finality is under threat. That responsiveness is exactly what we observe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Could BTC Miners Be Bribed?<\/h2>\n

Addressing a related meme\u2014that Bitcoin would need a \u201cbribe oracle\u201d to know when to match an attacker\u2019s payoff\u2014Rochard says the premise is wrong. \u201cShort answer: there is no \u2018bribe oracle,\u2019 and you do not need one. The network does not try to divine the bribe\u2019s size. It sets a visible bounty for honest behavior and lets miners choose the higher expected payoff.\u201d In his framing, \u201cpublic bounty beats secret promise.\u201d During censorship or a reorg attempt, wallets and receivers raise fees on the suppressed transactions, creating a pot that is \u201cpublicly visible and immediately collectible by the first miner who confirms the parent.\u201d<\/p>\n

By contrast, \u201cthe bribe\u2026 is private, uncertain, and typically conditional on multi-party success. Rational miners compare a sure payout now to a risky off-chain IOU later.\u201d Crucially, \u201cyou do not need to match the bribe, only its risk-adjusted value,\u201d because any private offer is discounted by enforcement uncertainty, reputational and legal risk, and the probability a coalition fails when someone defects. The fee bounty \u201cauto-scales without an oracle\u201d as backlogs grow and users rebid; \u201cevery miner sees the same mempool price signals and can defect at any moment to take the pot.\u201d<\/p>\n

That incentive makes \u201ccartels brittle,\u201d since \u201cthe first pool to break ranks earns the high fees and ends the attack,\u201d forcing any briber to keep paying more parties as defections loom. And to sustain a 51% campaign<\/a>, \u201cbribes must be repeated, not one-off\u2026 for as long as users keep raising confirmations and fees.\u201d The only truly \u201ctrustless\u201d bribe, he says, is an on-chain one\u2014\u201cwhich is just a very large fee attached to a specific block outcome\u201d\u2014and that \u201ccollapses back into the public fee market.\u201d<\/p>\n

The exchange drew a challenge from an Ethereum community member, who argued that Rochard\u2019s logic \u201conly works if the attacker is censoring,\u201d and raised concerns about double-spends, \u201cchaos sowing,\u201d ASIC-level compromises, and pool collusion. Rochard separated two categories\u2014\u201c\u2018censoring forever\u2019\u201d versus \u201ccausing chaos for a while\u201d\u2014and argued neither is \u201ceasy or one-way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Threats Of A Reorg<\/h2>\n

On censorship and shallow reorgs, he reiterated that \u201cwith ~51 percent an attacker can try to exclude targets or reorg shallow history,\u201d but as supply of confirmations drops, \u201curgent users rebid with RBF or CPFP, and the next parent-confirming block becomes very valuable. A single block at 1,000 sats per vB on ~1,000,000 vB pays about 10 BTC in fees. That visible bounty gives every non-attacking pool a dominant incentive to defect.\u201d On double-spends and turbulence, he pointed to real-world behavior: \u201cExchanges and large receivers already raise confirmation counts when reorg risk rises\u2026 pushing a would-be attacker into a long, expensive campaign rather than a quick hit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Colluding pools, he argued, face a payout-competition problem\u2014\u201cA colluding pool that omits high-fee transactions underpays its own hashers and quickly bleeds hashrate to rivals. Miners can repoint hash within minutes\u201d\u2014and he highlighted protocol-level trends that reduce coordination power: \u201cStratum v2 job negotiation further reduces pool-level control by letting miners choose their own templates, which makes coordinated censorship even harder to sustain.\u201d<\/p>\n

On hardware compromise scenarios, Rochard framed them as throughput shocks rather than rule failures: \u201cA large outage would slow blocks for a few epochs, then difficulty steps down and unaffected miners earn more. The outage also produces the same fee spike and defection incentives that pull additional hash online.\u201d<\/p>\n

So-called \u201cvampire\u201d attacks like on Monero<\/a> this week that redirect external compute are, in his view, \u201cmuch harder on Bitcoin than on small CPU- or GPU-mined coins,\u201d because \u201cBitcoin\u2019s SHA-256 hash is mostly tied up in dedicated ASICs already mining BTC,\u201d leaving no cheap, massive rental pool that can be quietly redirected. The upshot is that any credible, sustained attack would require \u201cmajority hash, unwavering cartel discipline despite a rising fee bounty for defection, exchanges that refuse to raise confirmations, and users who refuse to rebid,\u201d plus a price crash large enough to outpace the attacker\u2019s burn rate. \u201cThat stack of assumptions runs against how miners, exchanges, and users actually behave.\u201d<\/p>\n

His bottom line compresses the argument into one sentence: \u201cBitcoin does not assume miners are altruists. It assumes they are paid to end your attack.\u201d In Rochard\u2019s telling, tip attacks reduce the supply of confirmations, users with money at stake raise fees, non-attacking miners defect to capture them, receivers lengthen confirmation windows, and difficulty resets the baseline. The \u201csecurity budget problem,\u201d on this view, is not a hole to be plugged with perpetual inflation but \u201ca market process that scales up the cost of attacks precisely when it matters.\u201d<\/p>\n

At press time, BTC traded $117,746.<\/p>\n

\"Bitcoin<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pierre Rochard, VP of Research at Riot Platforms, one of the largest publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies and CEO of The Bitcoin Bond Company says the most persistent narrative about Bitcoin\u2019s long-term security\u2014an alleged \u201cbudget shortfall\u201d as block subsidies decline\u2014is built on a category error. In a series of posts on X today, August 15, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3,4,5],"class_list":["post-42473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-crypto","tag-doge","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42473\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}