[PragmaticPulp]

I don’t think the realistic attack vectors include nation states trying to out-compete the network on hash rate by building a competing network. If China wanted to make this a priority, for example, they’d just use military force to seize existing mining operations which are heavily centralized and easy to find.

A more realistic attack angle would be a large mining corporation recognizing a financial opportunity to undermine Bitcoin. If some organization could position themselves as a superior alternative to Bitcoin, crashing the Bitcoin network with periodic mining attacks could be worth the cost. Alternatively, if an entity could amass a large enough short position on Bitcoin, attacking the network to drive down the price might be attractive. We’d have to run the math on the scenarios, which is the point of projects like this.

> Even if they did currently, the endgame for Bitcoin as envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto was for everyone on the planet to be mining Bitcoin at the same time.

The amount of wasted energy would be insane if everyone on the planet was mining Bitcoin.

Currently, it looks like we’re on a trajectory where large mining operations will centralize a lot of the eventually custom mining hardware. Individuals will have less and less incentive to mine Bitcoin as the reward decreases.