> How much does the security budget need to be? There's the famous paper "The Economic Limits of Bitcoin and the Blockchain" [0, 1] answering this question. Bo

> How much does the security budget need to be? There's the famous paper "The Economic Limits of Bitcoin and the Blockchain" [0, 1] answering this question. Bottom line: huge. > Nakamoto’s novel form of trust faces serious economic limits. It is unusually expensive in absolute terms relative to the stakes involved, and its expense scales linearly with the stakes involved. [...] if permissionless consensus in its pure form were to become a more important part of the global economic and financial system than it has been to date, then the costs of securing the trust would become preposterous — more than all of global GDP in some scenarios. David Rosenthal has good introductory posts on this [2] in his excellent blog. [0] Original 2018 version: https://www.nber.org/papers/w24717 https://www.nber.org/papers/w24717 [1] Updated 2024 version [pdf]: https://socialsciences.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/2024-09/Economic%20Limits%20Crypto%20Blockchains%20-%20QJE%20Sept%202024.pdf https://socialsciences.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/2024... [2] https://blog.dshr.org/2025/05/who-is-mining-bitcoin.html https://blog.dshr.org/2025/05/who-is-mining-bitcoin.html https://blog.dshr.org/2018/06/cryptocurrencies-have-limits.html https://blog.dshr.org/2018/06/cryptocurrencies-have-limits.h... https://blog.dshr.org/2019/02/the-economics-of-bitcoin-transactions.html https://blog.dshr.org/2019/02/the-economics-of-bitcoin-trans... https://blog.dshr.org/2024/05/fee-only-bitcoin.html https://blog.dshr.org/2024/05/fee-only-bitcoin.html