Bitcoin's "Security Budget" Debunked

Bitcoin's "Security Budget" Debunked

From Bitcoin University by Bitcoin University

April 24, 2026

About this episode

The episode debunks the concept of Bitcoin's security budget and discusses the importance of individual node operation for network security.

Join Bitcoin University Premium: https://www.bitcoinuniversity.com/join In this video, I debunk Bitcoin's imaginary "security budget" problem. There is no defined level of miner revenue where the Bitcoin network is safe from chain rewriting attacks, especially as long as mining pool centralization persists. Rather what will protect the network is hodlers running nodes and using them to build their own block templates and mine with them. A Bitcoiner who owns 1 BTC will need to spend something like $1.90/day to help to secure the network that holds his life savings. Bitcoin Core devs and supporters, shipcoiners, Bitcoin spam promoters and many others seem to think that the security budget is a real problem, mostly because they're unable to imagine a world where plebs are running their own nodes and mining with them using rented hashrate. Not investment advice! Consult a financial advisor. Bitcoin's total hashrate has exploded higher: https://data.hashrateindex.com/network-data/network Bitcoin mining pool centralization: https://mainnet.observer/charts/mining-pools-hashrate-distribution/ David Bailey invoking the "security budget" to justify spam…

People in this episode

Host: Bitcoin University

Topics covered

  • Bitcoin security budget
  • mining pool centralization
  • node operation
  • chain rewriting attacks
  • Bitcoin network security

Keywords

  • Bitcoin
  • security budget
  • mining
  • nodes
  • hashrate
  • chain attacks
  • decentralization

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