A key master stroke in the design of Bitcoin is “Proof of Work”. It is how Bitcoin holds it’s power. Here’s how it works:
A new block of bitcoin transactions, a ledger, is made every ten minutes since January of 2009. Those blocks are created by the distributed computing power of whomever decides to belong to the network at that particular time, the so-called miners. They are given an algorithmic puzzle to solve which matches their compute capabilities to create hashes (alphanumeric strings), and they are rewarded with newly-made bitcoin.
Now the power of the network is measured in hash rate which is about 900 exahashes (900 quintillion hashes) a second right now, or 900 million, millions of billions of hashes per second. As the computing power grows, the algorithm becomes increasingly difficult, on purpose, so that it takes ten minutes to solve the block no matter what–which is, again, just a bunch of bitcoin transactions that were requested in that ten minutes and then wrapped in this puzzle.
Now this protocol was designed specifically to be an increasingly inefficient energy hog that would spur a compute race to ensure the most powerful network possible.
Which it is.
Bitcoin is the most powerful computer network on Earth even though it still comprises only a fraction of a percent of the addressable capital market.
As more miners come onboard, they must expend more and more energy to solve the increasingly difficult algorithmic puzzle to mine less and less BTC; resulting in the requisite block every ten minutes; verified by a million-plus network of independent nodes, contributing to that consensus of their own free will.
Bitcoin’s power is in the power it takes to create Bitcoin. It is a digital beehive of activity. There is simply too much good human energy now pursuing this digital asset for it to be overtaken by anything, good or evil, of human design.
The energy equation looks like this:
Energy in joules; equal to Hash rate per second, times the Time duration per block, times the CPU computing Power in watts, divided by efficiency e (E=H*T*P/e).
This equation shows that BTC is a power greater than any that can overtake it. The reward for energy spent towards the moral use of BTC far exceeds the energy any nefarious power could possibly muster and expend to undermine it, especially since no power or technology exists to crack even the present block being mined, never mind the exponentially-encrypted chain of blocks back to the Genesis Block of 2009.
