 In a debate between Anthony Pongliano and Matthew Green, Dr. Green argued that a bad actor with seven billion dollars can bring Bitcoin down by dossing it with empty blocks. What's truth? If anything, does Dr. Green's message convey would a nation-state attempt be able to make such a move? Or would a nation-state attempt such a move? First of all, let's explain some of the terminology here. What is dossing? Dossing is not the disk operating system from Microsoft. That means denial of service. And empty blocks are blocks that simply have no transactions in them. And what Dr. Green is talking about in this particular case is the ability to attack Bitcoin using a 51% attack from an actor that has no monetary incentive to do so. We talked a lot about the idea that from a perspective of monetary incentives, it doesn't make much sense to do a 51% attack because a 51% attack isn't profitable. There are very narrow circumstances under which you can make it profitable. You won't really recoup an investment like seven billion dollars. So the obvious argument or follow-up question is, okay, what about a nation-state that is not interested in a monetary reward? Basically, a nation-state that just wants to grief us, that just wants to do this out of malice with the intention of breaking Bitcoin, of bringing Bitcoin down. And so the calculation here is that for approximately seven billion dollars in spending, a nation-state can execute a 51% attack against Bitcoin. And while doing so produce the largest cumulative difficulty chain with blocks without putting any transactions in them, these will be perfectly valid. And of course, that's a denial of service because no transactions are getting validated. All right, first of all, is this possible? Yes, it's possible to do. It would probably take more than seven billion dollars. And part of the reason it would take more than seven billion dollars is because there is a worldwide shortage of these types of chips. In fact, there's a worldwide shortage of any type of chip right now. And trying to move into a market of ASIC chips will affect prices in that market. So what a nation-state would be doing is creating significant additional demand in the manufacturing of chips in a place where the supply is not very elastic. Manufacturing fabrication factories are at capacity. In fact, they're beyond capacity and have been for quite a while now. So you can't simply just demand and get these orders filled. It would be noticeable as well. And it would probably cost more. And that's not counting the electricity cost to sustain a 51% attack. But all of this is just detail, right? The real question is, a well-funded adversary, what's seven billion dollars? Seven billion dollars for a nation-state is a significant amount of money for sure. But it's not unachievable. And even if it was double that or even triple that, nation-states can raise that kind of money. It would be a fairly expensive endeavor. Now, the question is, is it worth doing? Well, that depends on whether it's successful in the long term. And the only part of the statement that I would nitpick is the idea that this will bring Bitcoin down. What it will do is it will deny service. And that denial of service will certainly have a temporary impact on Bitcoin's price. And it will also cause a lot of grief among those who are trying to use Bitcoin to do things. But will it actually bring Bitcoin down? I don't think so, primarily because as soon as this attack is stopped and it's very expensive to sustain from an electricity perspective, then Bitcoin's back again. And if you know that that's the case, all you have to do is wait out and wait out someone who's spending a lot of money to sustain this attack, that's assuming that there is no countermeasure. Of course, there may be many countermeasures that are applied in this particular case, all the way to the extreme countermeasure, which is either changing the consensus algorithm or adding an element of proof of stake to the consensus algorithm to make it so that outsiders who do not actually own Bitcoin can't grief the network in this way. Is this possible? Yes. But I don't think it would actually bring Bitcoin down or kill Bitcoin, which at that moment becomes the strongest counter narrative here, which is would you spend $20 billion or $10 billion or even $7 billion to do an attack that ultimately proves that Bitcoin can't be stopped? Because that's the risk, right? The risk is that you try this attack and then Bitcoin survives it. And what you've proven at great expense is that Bitcoin can survive a nation state attack. At that point, Bitcoin is even more popular than ever. You've basically proved the fundamental issue. I think Bitcoin could survive this, and it might be affected, it might set it back, it might be damaged temporarily, but it would survive. And by surviving, it would strengthen the narrative of survival, which would undermine the entire purpose of doing this. So as they say, if you take a shot at the king, try not to miss. Hi, I'm Andreas Antonopoulos. If you enjoyed that video, consider that it takes a lot of work to produce open and free content that can be shared with everyone around the world. This isn't sponsored by some company. It's not promoting a product or an altcoin or some kind of investment scheme. My goal is simply to help explain the technology of Bitcoin and open blockchains to as many people as possible in a neutral way that focuses really on the incredible possibilities that this technology brings us. 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