In a heated exchange on social media platform X, prominent Ethereum advocate and co-founder of Etherealize, Grant Hummer, claimed that Bitcoin’s security budget has reached a critical vulnerability. He suggested it would cost only $8 billion to execute a 51% attack on the network.
Ethereum vs. Bitcoin Debate Heats Up
Hummer’s remarks came in response to a widely circulated post by crypto analyst Zayn Rynes, known online as ChainLinkGod. Rynes asserted that “Ethereum is fighting a war on three fronts and not really winning any of them currently,” including its store-of-value (SoV) competition with Bitcoin. Rynes argued that “ETH is not a better SoV commodity money than BTC (fight me),” and questioned Ethereum’s scalability against alt Layer 1s and data availability solutions like Celestia.
While Rynes maintained that “ETH has the best bet to overcome these headwinds,” he was skeptical about the long-term value of Layer 1 tokens in general, stating, “The entire L1 coin category is massively overvalued.” He added, “BTC continues to dominate as the primary SoV commodity money reverse asset.” Further, Rynes predicted that app chains and stablecoins would eat into the value captured by base-layer tokens.
Hummer fired back, focusing his critique on Bitcoin’s security model under its Proof-of-Work mechanism. “Respectfully, BTC is completely screwed because of its security budget,” he wrote. Hummer added, “It would only cost $8B to 51% attack BTC today. When this gets down to $2B… a 51% attack is virtually certain to happen.”
Is $8B Sufficient to Attack 51% Bitcoin?
Addressing potential skepticism about the feasibility of such an attack, Hummer elaborated: “You could quietly stockpile ASICs, or even build them yourself. Nobody would notice because you could mine an alternate fork silently, then flip your ASICs on and make that the canonical fork of BTC and execute a bunch of double spends.”
He also emphasized the potential financial upside of an attack: “Throw in some short sales for extra fun. The returns from a successful 51% attack + short sale at size are insanely large. A couple billion dollars of spending is peanuts when you’re talking about global scale macro assets.”
A user replied, questioning the plausibility of such a scenario: “Imagine buying 51% of existing hashrate without anyone noticing… worse – imagine deploying 101% of new hashrate without anyone noticing.”
Hummer remained firm in his position, citing the lack of visibility in ASIC accumulation and the systemic risk embedded in Bitcoin’s current economic security model. “This will become blindingly obvious over the next decade,” he warned.
On ther contrary, some analysts argue that carrying out a 51% attack on Bitcoin would require much more effort and capital than most assessments estimate. Individuals mounting this type of attack need both to win a majority of the network’s computing resources and then instantly put forth a different chain of blocks.
A significant number of computers would have to be employed in order to carry out this action. The state-of-the-art WhatsMiner M63S ASIC miner has been selling for over $10,000 and yields unprecedented computation power of 406TH/s. Trying to control more than half of the computing power behind Bitcoin today would require building up an enormous array of high-end cryptocurrency mining machines.
Also, gathering such an immense amount of computing power requires major resources and operational know-how, as well as preventing detection by the network. However, the complexity of the Bitcoin network and its highly distributed nature make it unlikely that a major modification to its protocol could be carried out.
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