The secret of Bitcoin’s unkillability: the anti-fragile fortress built by three-layer consensus

Nakamoto 2025-11-17 17:20 62507人围观 BTC

Click on the blue text to follow us After reading "Bit Standard" and closing the page, the most shocking thing is not the price increase of Bitcoin, but its consensus system that "cannot be killed or dismantled". Since the birth of the genesis block in 20

Click on the blue words to follow us

After reading "Bit Standard" and closing the page, the most shocking thing is not the price increase of Bitcoin, but its consensus system that "cannot be beaten to death or dismantled." From the birth of the genesis block in 2009 to the present, it has escaped hacker attacks, government blockades, and price collapses. It has never relied on a single technology, but on a triple protection network of economic interests, technical architecture, and social recognition. This layer of the network hides the essence of human game and decentralization, which is also its true "immortal password".

economic consensus

The most cruel trick of Bitcoin is to use real money to tie participants into a community of interests. The core logic of this layer of consensus is simple: the cost of destroying the network is 10,000 times higher than the benefits of protecting it.

The miners group is the most typical example. Want to mine? First spend several million to buy mining machines, and then spend hundreds of thousands to pay for electricity. These are real sunk costs. In 2023, a mine owner made a calculation: a single Antminer S21 mining machine costs 40,000 yuan, and the daily electricity bill costs 50 yuan, and it will take half a year of mining to recover the money.

If someone wants to carry out a 51% computing power attack - that is, to control more than half of the entire network's computing power to tamper with transactions, they must first buy nearly half of the world's mining machines. The hardware cost alone exceeds 20 billion US dollars, and they must also bear hundreds of millions of yuan in electricity bills every day.

What's more important is the game dilemma of killing one thousand enemies and losing ten thousand to oneself. Once the attack is successful, the reputation of Bitcoin will collapse and the price will return to zero. The mining machine in the hands of the attacker will become scrap metal, the coins mined will become waste paper, and the income will be directly lost.

In 2014, Ethereum Classic suffered a 51% attack. The attacker spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, but in the end only made tens of thousands of dollars, and was reviled by the entire network. Looking back at honest mining, before the Bitcoin halving in 2024, top mines can make a net profit of millions every day. This reality of "abiding by the rules is more profitable" has made rational people become automatic guardians of the network.

This is the subtlety of economic consensus: it does not rely on moral constraints, but uses the lever of interest to leverage human nature and make every participant a part of maintaining the network.

“The Immutable Wall”

If economic consensus is a soft constraint, then technical consensus is the hard nut of Bitcoin. It uses distributed architecture and cryptography to turn the traditional financial central database into a global shared ledger, making it impossible for hackers to start.

A traditional bank is like a single-door hospital. Hackers can pry open the door and change the ledger.； Bitcoin is like a million townhouses all over the world, and copies of the ledger are stored in more than 100,000 nodes, everywhere from computer rooms in the United States to home computers in China. Want to tamper with transactions? You have to break into these 100,000 villas at the same time, and you have to get them all to approve your modifications - this is technically impossible.

Even more amazing is the computing power wall built by the Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism. Each block carries a unique hashed password, like a timestamp. If you want to change a transaction 3 days ago, you have to recalculate the hash values of all blocks from that day to the present, and the speed is faster than the other nodes in the entire network combined.

Calculated based on the computing power in 2025, this requires 1.5×10²⁰ operations per second, which is equivalent to tying all the supercomputers in the world to run for several years. The cost is ridiculously high.

In 2018, a hacker team threatened to break into the Bitcoin network. However, after struggling for three months, they could not even obtain the permissions of a single node. In the end, they had to admit: "This is not a technical problem, but a physical limit problem." ”

The ultimate defense network that can "self-heal"

What is more solid than technology is the bottom line of consensus engraved in the hearts of the community. The most amazing thing about this layer of defense is that even if the technology is broken through, people can make Bitcoin come back to life. This is its anti-fragile nature.

Physical suppression is useless. In 2021, China completely liquidated its mining farms, and its computing power seemed to plummet. However, within half a year, these mining machines were moved to Kazakhstan and Canada, and the computing power of the entire network hit a new high.

Bitcoin nodes are located in more than 200 countries and regions. Even if a country bans it, as long as there is still a computer running a node, the network will not be interrupted. As said in "Bit Standard": "You can shut down mining machines, but you can't shut down people's demand for decentralized currencies. ”

Hard forks are a trump card against extreme attacks. In the 2016 Ethereum DAO incident, hackers stole $50 million in tokens, and the community directly initiated a hard fork, rolled back transactions, and abandoned the attacked chain.

If one day someone uses a quantum computer to tamper with the Bitcoin ledger, developers, exchanges, and users will immediately reach a consensus: they will not recognize this fake chain! Then a fork is initiated, allowing the attacker to guard a pile of fake coins that no one recognizes, while the real Bitcoin continues to run on the new chain.

This is the core of social consensus: the value of Bitcoin is never given by the code, but 100 million users collectively believe that it is valuable. This belief is more stubborn than any technology, and it has become more tenacious the more suppressed it is.

Consensus is

Bitcoin’s “Ultimate Currency””

Many people stare at the price fluctuations of Bitcoin, but forget that its real innovation is the consensus system. Economic consensus uses interests to lock people in, technical consensus uses architecture to defend against attacks, and social consensus uses faith to sustain life. The three layers are interlocking, turning decentralization from a concept into a reality.

As written in the book: “The SHA-256 algorithm will become obsolete and mining machines will become obsolete, but the game of human nature and the need for trust will always exist. ” The vitality of Bitcoin lies in the fact that it weaves these eternal human natures into a web of consensus that cannot be killed or dismantled. As long as there are people who believe in the value of decentralization, this network will always exist - this may be its scariest and most fascinating part.

Accelerate Grow

Focus on information sharing in the investment field

For more exciting content, please follow us

Looking forward to your sharing, likes and watching