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by ziml77 1892 days ago
And this is exactly the problem with Bitcoin. Adding more computational power to the network changes absolutely nothing in terms of the amount of mining completed per unit time. Instead it just shuffles around the chances of being the one to succeed at a block.

This is something that I'm not sure many people actually understand. Because in the physical world, increasing your energy input into mining will result in more output of the resource you're mining. Adding another excavator to your mine doesn't reduce the effectiveness of every other excavator in the world.

2 comments

Yeah, the only point of the mining system is to secure the blockchain. As more and more energy is spent on it, the more energy is needed to attack it.

It just turns greed into security. As long as it's profitable to mine, it's practically impossible for someone to do a 51% attack.

It directly increases the difficulty of doing a 51% attack.