🚨 **How Much Does It Cost to Attack Bitcoin?

Less Than You Think. More Than You Can Afford.**

Everyone throws around “spam attack” like it’s cheap.
So let’s put real numbers on what it would cost to attack Bitcoin using nothing but OP_RETURN and blockspace pressure.


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1️⃣ Filling Every Block With Spam Is Shockingly Cheap

Using today’s parameters:

1 sat/vB to fill a whole block

That’s 0.01 BTC per block ≈ $1,000/block

144 blocks per day → $144,000/day

1 year → $52 million


So for the price of a mid-tier government IT budget, you can monopolize the world’s hardest blockchain for an entire year.


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**2️⃣ Digest That:

$50M = A Year of Maximum Bitcoin Congestion.**

This is pocket change for:

A Fortune 100 company

A hedge fund

A hostile nation-state

A bored billionaire

A DAO with governance drama

A disgruntled ICO “community”


The attacker doesn’t need ideology.
They just need capital and patience.


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**3️⃣ Want Real Pain?

Scale the fee pressure.**

5 sat/vB sustained → ~$360K/day → $130M/year

10 sat/vB full blocks → ~$1.44M/day → $526M/year


Now you’re talking about
multi-hundred-million-dollar attacks that hurt everyday users and businesses.

And yes — this is absolutely within reach of
major adversaries, intelligence agencies, and sovereign budgets.


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4️⃣ But Here’s the Plot Twist

Even $500M cannot guarantee Bitcoin becomes unusable.

Why?

Because Bitcoin has a “social immune system”:

Node operators can instantly drop OP_RETURN back to 83 bytes

Miners can filter obvious payload spam

Policy can tighten

Relay rules can shift

BIP-444 is already a reactionary “immune response”


The more an attacker spends,
the more the network adapts.


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5️⃣ The Real Asymmetry

A few million dollars can absolutely:

disrupt retail

delay exchanges

push businesses onto Lightning

spike fees

trigger headlines

hurt the end-user experience


But to sustain existential impact?
You need a nation-state burn rate.

And even then, Bitcoin doesn’t die.
Your money just does.


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⭐ Perspective

Bitcoin’s enemies can cost it time.
But they cannot buy its failure.

To attack Bitcoin for a week costs millions.
To attack it for a year costs tens to hundreds of millions.
To defeat it costs…

more than any attacker can burn without defeating themselves.