Why is Bitcoin safe, and will it be valuable forever? Here are 3 ways to knock it down

Nakamoto 2025-10-2 07:43 19213人围观 BTC

The price of Bitcoin rises and falls, setting off an eye-catching and crazy trend, and the blockchain has been pushed to the forefront. New players are entering the market all the time, and you’re eager to try it out—but wait, what is Bitcoin?

“Situations like "buy 10 excavators to mine Bitcoin" and "collect physical Bitcoin at high prices" are just jokes. What about MLM organizations that treat blockchain as a gimmick? One can only sigh at the pervasiveness of criminals - but wait, what is blockchain?

Some scams in the name of Bitcoin

Whether you are eating melons or melon seeds, how do you understand the blockchain and blockchain digital currency (Bitcoin)? This article will be divided into two parts to dismantle these issues: Part 1, what exactly is blockchain and Bitcoin? ； The second part, what are the “Achilles heel” of Bitcoin that can be broken into.

This article is for readers who are new to Bitcoin and blockchain. You do not need to have any mathematics or computer knowledge.

Core functions

In the following paragraphs the game refers to Bitcoin and the blockchain network, and the players are the participants in the game.

1

Bitcoin

The Bitcoin network is connected by many computers. Each player installs the Bitcoin client on his or her computer and is connected to the network. There are thousands of computers in this network, but the output of Bitcoin is automatically controlled by the program. The Bitcoin network automatically coordinates every computer connected to the network to control the number of Bitcoins created every hour. It uses your computer to solve a difficult and time-consuming mathematical problem. In this way, currency is created. Only the computer that solves the problem can obtain the Bitcoin bounty, so more computing power means a greater chance of obtaining more Bitcoins.

So the question arises: How to determine who the legal owner of a Bitcoin is? If someone else pretends to be me to pay, how can the security be guaranteed?

Don’t worry, below we will introduce the electronic signatures and blockchain that protect the security of Bitcoin.

2

electronic signature

Bitcoin does not have physical currency, so don’t believe the scam of selling physical collectible coins!

Each player in the game can have several "wallets", and of course the wallets contain money. But the wallet is anonymous and uses electronic signatures to identify and protect players. The function of the electronic signature is to prove that the wallet is yours and you have the right to spend money from the wallet.

An electronic signature is divided into two parts, one is the public key and the other is the private key. In the eyes of other players, the public key is your wallet, and the private key is what you use to prove your identity when you spend money. You should protect it from others! For each transaction, the game will use the public key and private key to calculate together to prove that the wallet is yours, preventing malicious players from pretending to be you paying or pretending to be you to collect money.

3

Blockchain

If electronic currency is just a virtual number that any player can modify at will, this will definitely not work. Blockchain is a weapon that prevents money from being created out of thin air, and it also prevents money from being maliciously spent twice.

The game strings together all transactions to form a centralized ledger, which contains all accounts starting from the first transaction, which is a transaction chain, so that the game can know the balance of each wallet.

But where does this ledger exist? Because the game does not have a central manager and is decentralized, in principle every player has a copy of the ledger. When a new transaction occurs, the transaction will be broadcast to other players, and the ledger will be checked at the same time, and the new transaction will be included in the ledger copy. If you try to make money by forging ledgers, then your ledgers will be different from those of other players, and the forgery will be exposed as soon as you check them during the transaction. Therefore, in theory, every transaction must be confirmed by all players, and each player is responsible for ensuring the security of the system.

But in practice this is difficult to do, and the confirmation operation can only be completed by some players. This creates opportunities for malicious players to tamper with and forge their own copies of the ledger, causing chaos. Therefore, a mechanism must be designed to increase the difficulty of forging ledgers, while also making it easy to identify forged ledgers.

4

Hash algorithm

This method of preventing forgery is the hash algorithm.

The hash algorithm can map any original data, whether it is a picture or text, to a specific number. This number is called a hash value. If the data is tampered with, the calculated hash value will change, so the problems of identifying forgery and preventing forgery can be solved. (The MD5 code used when downloading BT is a hash value, which is used to verify that the downloaded video has not been tampered with, or has been implanted with viruses. )

A Bitcoin mining farm

Hash algorithms have a concomitant disadvantage. To generate a hash value that is not easy to forge, it requires a lot of computer resources, and no one will do it voluntarily. The game uses reward currency to encourage some players to calculate hash values, and they are called miners. Several transactions that are close in time will be combined to form a block of the blockchain to calculate the hash value to ensure that the ledger is difficult to tamper with.

Of course, as long as the malicious miner has more computing power than half of the miners, he can still forge the ledger, then recalculate the hash values of all accounts, and let other miners copy his ledger. But as the number of miners increases, this becomes less likely to happen.

What is Bitcoin’s “Achilles’ heel”?

The idea of cracking Bitcoin is to try to find weaknesses in core functionality. for example:

Attacking electronic signature algorithms: stealing money from other people’s wallets；

Attack the blockchain: increase the cost of other miners, reduce the number of miners, so that you can get more rewards, or try to control the vast majority of miners to maliciously modify the ledger.

By what means might these attacks be carried out?

1

Quantum computing

Quantum computers are faster than traditional computers. In 2016, Google and NASA built a quantum computer that is 100 million times faster than ordinary computers. Of course, this technology is still in the experimental stage so far.

The public key encryption algorithm used in electronic signature technology is relatively easy to be broken by quantum computers. Malicious players can try to forge wallets and steal other people's money. The maintainers of Bitcoin technology have considered this problem. Although most current electronic signature algorithms may fail, there is still a signature algorithm called Lamport that can resist quantum attacks.

The computing power of quantum computers is amazing, but it is still difficult to crack the hash algorithm, so it is still impossible to rely on quantum computers to forge ledgers. And because the wallet is also encrypted with a hash algorithm, it is actually not easy for malicious players to steal other people's money. It is estimated that a quantum computer that can break the hash algorithm requires more than 1,500 qubits, and current technology can only reach more than 100 qubits.

Although quantum computers sound like a formidable opponent, only large companies such as IBM and Google have enough financial resources and manpower to develop and use them. The possibility of malicious players using quantum computers is very low.

Of course, Bitcoin is only the most famous of blockchain electronic currencies. Many electronic currencies that emerged later incorporated anti-quantum computing into their designs, such as IOTA, which was established in 2015. The probability of quantum computers cracking electronic currency is not high.

、

2

drive away competitors

Malicious miners may also try to monopolize all rewards, trying to control the game and rewrite the ledger to create money for themselves out of thin air. To do this, he might need to drive away the other miners. How to do it?

He could try to make mining hardware unaffordable to other miners. He can try to increase the cost of electricity to increase the expenses of other miners. He can increase network costs and make his own network much faster than others, or maliciously slow down other people's networks, or make it impossible to transmit Bitcoin transaction data in other people's networks. The recent abolition of "net neutrality" in the United States will cause similar problems.

Overall, it just increases the cost for everyone else. In this way, players who have more computing resources, greater network bandwidth, and can afford the electricity bill can continue to mine and have a better chance of controlling the entire game. However, such an operation requires sufficient financial resources and is not easy to achieve.

3

Destroys confidence

In addition to technical measures, there is also an attack on the confidence of consumers who use Bitcoin for actual consumption, mainly on the credit of Bitcoin.

Although the anonymity of the game helps prevent the leakage of personal privacy, it can also easily encourage black market transactions. The use of unreasonable technology will also facilitate Ponzi schemes. However, when used in industrial infrastructure such as smart grids and logistics systems, blockchain technology can bring benefits to users, which requires the investment and support of large companies. In other words, good tools should be used in good places.

At the same time, the increase in mining costs has become a climate change issue. It is expected that the electricity consumed in 2017 has accounted for 0.19% of global power generation. In 2019, its electricity consumption is expected to exceed the annual electricity consumption of the United States. One Bitcoin transaction consumes enough electricity to power eight average American households for a day. However, at this point, the future expectation is that the revenue from Bitcoin mining will slowly become zero, fewer users will participate in mining, and the hardware will be designed to be more power-efficient, both of which will reduce energy consumption.

Ordinary currencies use trust as the basis, and only when currency prices are stable can they be used for transactions. The same goes for Bitcoin. Only when the currency value is stable and the technology has no loopholes can we gain everyone's trust and use it to purchase goods and services. At present, this has not been fully achieved, but some designers are already taking action to design new cryptocurrencies with fewer price stability vulnerabilities to replace Bitcoin that may have become obsolete.

Perhaps cryptocurrencies will have their weaknesses anyway, just like current currencies have theirs. But designers and developers are still working hard to fix it, hoping it will get better in the future.

an AI
It is said that the first recorded purchase of goods with Bitcoin occurred on May 17, 2010: Programmer Laszlo Hanyecz bought two Domino's pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoins. Now that I think about it, it’s too expensive.……

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