Forget hacking. Just buy more mining power than the rest of the world combined. Money always wins — right?
Mining power = the computing muscle that writes Bitcoin's next page of records. Own more than half and you get a say in what gets written. What is Bitcoin mining?
Dollar and power figures are estimates — hardware and electricity prices move. Sources.
🎉 YOU WIN — here's your prize
✅ You can now
- Delay other people's payments — while you keep paying the bills
- Un-spend your own recent payments
❌ You still cannot
- Steal a single coin — every wallet is still locked by its key (Attack 1)
- Print new coins — every node checks the rules (Attack 5)
- Change history from years ago
Has this ever actually happened?
Yes — to small coins. Bitcoin Gold and Ethereum Classic were genuinely 51%-attacked, because renting a majority against a small network is cheap. Bitcoin's sheer scale is the shield; this page's price tag is that shield in dollars. And one mining pool did once approach half the network (GHash.io, 2014) — then voluntarily shrank, because its members knew what it would do to the value of everything they owned.