Picture this: It's 2032. Bitcoin hits $1 million. Miners are earning just 0.78 BTC per block, down from today's 3.125 BTC. The network is worth $21 trillion, but the security budget in BTC terms is pittance relatively.
A hostile actor, maybe a nation state, hedge fund or just some troll with generational wealth, decides they want chaos. They want fear. They want panic. But most of all, they want more Bitcoin. Lots more.
Here’s their playbook: Take a $100 billion short position on Bitcoin, MicroStrategy, every public miner stock and as many alts as possible. Build this over weeks so it doesn’t spook the market. At the same time, quietly approach major mining pools. Offer them 2 BTC per block in bribes, more than they’d earn legitimately, along with insider information about the coming price move. The miners take the deal, hedging with their own massive shorts.
Then comes 48 hours of chaos: mining empty blocks to slow the network, selectively double-spending major exchanges, and reversing high-profile transactions. Detection is inevitable, but by the time users react, the damage is done. Mainstream media headlines scream: “Bitcoin Broken! How a 20 Year Old Known Issue Was Never Resolved.”
Bitcoin crashes 50%. MicroStrategy drops 70%. Mining stocks crater 80%. Alts jump off a cliff. The hostile actor’s combined short positions print $50+ billion profit.
And then the twist: they know Bitcoin isn’t dead, just wounded. They know this security budget issue will finally be taken seriously. This is a one time arbitrage play. Using their profits, they accumulate as much Bitcoin as they can at the bottom. They’re not Bitcoin bears, they’re predators exploiting a structural weakness.
When miners earn almost nothing, loyalty becomes cheap. When the cost of an attack is dwarfed by the profits from chaos, the incentives shift. And when that happens, the question isn’t if someone will run the numbers, it’s whether we’ll have fixed the problem by the time they do.
We need a solution, because somewhere, someone is already running said numbers. Whether it’s fee market reform, a change in block rewards, or something new, like subsidising miners with Bitcoin native digital commodities, the point is simple: act now, or let inaction become the real attack vector.