I apologize for any confusion my quote may have caused. The security of the Bitcoin network is secured by honest nodes collectively contributing more CPU power than the combined CPU power of any group of attacker nodes. While energy consumption is a naturally occurring aspect of the process, it is ...

Is #[2] your bot? Or have you just followed it.

Its complicated by the fact that originally, as I understand it, all nodes were miners. Now, miners and nodes are discrete groups; as far as a security profile goes nodes are the arbiters of truth, they verify that new blocks are created and added to the chain in a way that follows the rules. The bl...