There seems to be two main lines of criticism about drivechain, MEV and “miners can steal. ” I’m working on the MEV (still thinking through it) but here I’ll discuss the latter concern, which I think isn’t given the nuance it deserves. …

Moar security = good, right? — The general heuristic is that anything adding demand for fees is good for security. This is true especially if a fee market doesn’t materialize in the next 15–20 years; todays fee rates are clearly not sustainable when the subsidy has dropped by a factor of 32, or 64, etc. But…

For this to work, you need to have 51% of miners that are “rational”. If there are 51% of miners that are not maximizing profits in the short term, the censorship I’m describing is unlikely to be sustainable. By “rational” I’m assuming that miners are not worried about how their…

Bitcoin Security Trilemma: In as much as an attacker can marshal sufficient hashrate, Bitcoin must be A) Exploitable B)Value-Destructible or C)Mutable. The proof is straightforward: First of all, let’s suppose that C) and B) both fail. If C) fails, Bitcoins rules are etched in stone, and nobody can change this…

It will happen 2031/2032, when the halving is expected to change the block reward from 1.5625 to 0.78125 BTC / block. In 2030, the inflation of the total supply of Bitcoin will be about 0.4%, which is not a whole lot. Market dynamics surrounding the price will have changed: First…

Abstract: At the outset of some predetermined time epoch, miners run a quick hashing competition to signal their interest in joining a decentralized cartel. After majority participation is signaled, miners will spend the next several months only mining on top of blocks by members of the cartel. …

Brief Description Bitcoin was created in 2009 as a peer-to-peer payment network. To date, the network has never been disrupted. No powerful entity has been able to censor transactions or co-opt the network’s function in any way. Today, Bitcoin remains unstoppable. The desire for a global censorship-resistant deflationary currency is…

A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across. The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might sting. The scorpion replies that it could sting the frog at any time, but would not, as this would ruin any chances the…

As Bitcoin creeps into the real economy, a little backwards induction shows why one would expect such security assurances to fail — Competition between miners is central to Bitcoin. For now. For some party to directly enforce their will on the network, they would need to acquire at least 51% of the hashrate. Right now, such a feat is nearly impossible. Obtaining this 51% level of hashrate is so difficult to do…