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Why was trust worth 12.5 BTC every 10 minutes at the beginning of May 11 2020, but only worth 6.25 BTC every 10 minutes by the end of the day? How did trust ge

• aeternum 6y ago
  The hashrate decreased 25% over the few days on/around May 11 2020. So yes, the price paid for trust decreased 50% and in response the overall security of bitcoin dropped ~25% as a result.
  • rspeele 6y ago
    But the security is still good enough, right? As long as the mining expenditure exceeds the potential illicit rewards of a double-spend, it's not profitable to out-mine the network just to be able to double-spend. So the security of bitcoin should be an all-or-nothing thing: either a 51% attack is profitable, or it's not. It seems to me if there was some way to determine the potential real world reward of a double-spend, Bitcoin could spend exactly the right amount on security: that number + 1. I don't know how to calculate that number. I doubt that Bitcoin mining is matching it precisely because how would it? So it is probably overpaying or underpaying by some amount. So far, Bitcoin appears to have overpaid for security, given that it hasn't been 51%ed. Who knows by how much. Maybe after the next halving, or the one after that, it'll be underpaying?
    • aeternum 6y ago
      It's really hard to price security investment because the primary signal that you've spent too little is often a very costly hack. Flashloans and other derivatives greatly increase the risk since they now enable extreme leverage on only a small amount of initial capital.