The Great Bitcoin Hack Myth
Bitcoin Myths Part 12
Imagine you are a construction worker living paycheck to paycheck. You are working on a job site, tearing down a dilapidated building that will be sold as an empty lot. With an aching back, you swing a sledgehammer and hit something metallic underneath the floor. You tear up the floor (which you were going to destroy anyway) and discover a treasure chest filled with gold bars. The chest easily weighs 100 pounds, and the gold inside is worth millions of dollars.
What would you do? Would you put it back, say nothing, and pretend it doesn’t exist? Or would you do whatever you could to buy the property so you would own the gold?
I don’t know about you, but I would take out whatever loan was necessary to buy that property so I could own the treasure.
Bitcoin Stolen
Many people hear about exchanges like FTX and Mt. Gox losing customer funds and simply assume, “Bitcoin got hacked.” But this is the equivalent of hearing about a bank robbery and assuming the Federal Reserve was plundered. Many services hold bitcoin for their customers, but they are not the Bitcoin network. They are simply custodians of other people’s bitcoin.
It is one thing for an organization to lose your funds or allow them to be stolen. It is another thing to hack the network itself.
And Bitcoin is a network!
How to Become a Trillionaire
If you want to become a trillionaire, you do not have to start the next mega-corporation. You just need to hack the Bitcoin network.
Bitcoin’s market capitalization is $1.29 trillion as of July 14, 2026.1 If you found a way to exploit the network and steal even a large portion of its bitcoin, you would become extraordinarily wealthy.
If someone figured out how to hack Bitcoin but chose not to exploit it, that would be like leaving the treasure chest full of gold beneath the empty lot and doing nothing about it. Nobody could ignore that amount of money for long.
It is the ultimate bug bounty.
But There is a Problem
If you hack the Bitcoin network too successfully and prove that it is no longer secure, the value of bitcoin will quickly collapse. You may control the treasure, but the treasure will no longer be worth anything.
It is like the ancient Irish fairy tales. A man travels to fairyland and escapes with a chest filled with gold. But when he returns home and tries to spend it, the gold turns into lead. Bitcoin works the same way. Its value depends on the security of the network. If you destroy that security while trying to steal the bitcoin, you also destroy the value of what you stole.
You cannot remove the gold from fairyland, and you cannot remove Bitcoin’s security and still expect the bitcoin to be worth anything.
So the trillion-dollar bug bounty is not that simple.
How to Hack Bitcoin
There are three main ways to hack Bitcoin:
Find a catastrophic consensus bug
Control 51% of Bitcoin’s mining power
Break Bitcoin’s cryptography
All three of these are much easier said than done. Let’s see why.
Catastrophic Bugs
This should be easy. Bitcoin’s code is open source, so anyone can take a look at it.2 If you think you can find an exploit, be my guest. Countless developers have stared at Bitcoin’s code for hours without finding a bug that could defeat the network. And just remember that if someone finds the right bug, they become a trillionaire. Rest assured, people smarter than your whole family combined (mine too) have stared at this code for countless hours and failed to bring Bitcoin down.
However, a few serious vulnerabilities have been found. Let’s see how those turned out.
In 2010, someone found a value overflow bug.3 They used it to generate 184.4 billion bitcoin in a single transaction. The bug was quickly discovered, and a fix was released within five hours. The Bitcoin network adopted the patched version, the bad chain was overtaken, and the newly created bitcoin disappeared. The exploit became absolutely pointless.
In 2018, a developer discovered another bug that could have allowed a miner to create extra bitcoin by spending the same inputs twice within a single block.4 It does not appear that anyone ever exploited it. The vulnerability was kept quiet until the patch had been released and the network had time to upgrade.
Bitcoin has won twice. Hackers have won zero times. And it’s been 17 years.
51% Attack
Technically, you only need to control more than 50% of Bitcoin’s mining power, so 50.0000000001% would theoretically suffice. A 51% attack would allow you to double-spend your own bitcoin, censor transactions, and reorganize recent blocks. You still could not steal bitcoin directly from other people’s wallets or change Bitcoin’s consensus rules. But you could cause chaos, swindle exchanges, and spend the same bitcoin twice, which is what double-spending means.
Let’s look at how difficult a 51% attack would be.
It would be financially expensive. In 2021, the hardware alone was estimated to cost more than $5.46 billion.5 A later study using data from December 2023 estimated that the necessary mining equipment would cost at least $5.6 billion.6 But these were idealized gift-price estimates. They assumed the attacker could acquire millions of mining machines for what it cost the manufacturer to build them. They also did not account for the land, mining facilities, and electricity needed to run them.
It would be telegraphed. Buying or producing millions of Bitcoin miners would be impossible to hide. Once the Bitcoin community found out about it, miners would increase their hash power, and exchanges would take temporary measures to protect against double-spend attacks.
Fifty-one percent is just the beginning. Idle miners would come online during an attack, making it much harder to pull off. A realistically successful attack would require closer to 60%.
Bitcoin could pivot. In the worst-case scenario, Bitcoin would change its mining algorithm and make the attacker’s machines instantly obsolete. This would cost the attacker billions of dollars and leave them with nothing.
Realistically, only a nation-state could pull this off. A 51% attack would be viewed as illegal activity, and it would be too expensive anyway. A nation-state like China could afford it and might not care whether it made any money. But it would expose itself to sanctions from Bitcoin-friendly nations. And if its attack on Bitcoin failed, it would be a national embarrassment.
Break Bitcoin’s Cryptography
Perhaps the most important system protecting bitcoin ownership is the public- and private-key system that allows users to control their bitcoin. Bitcoin did not develop this system. Public-key cryptography has existed since the 1970s, and the specific elliptic curve Bitcoin uses was published in 2000. Bitcoin adopted a cryptographic system that experts had already spent years studying. The same basic form of cryptography is used to secure:
HTTPS websites
Online banking
Access to critical web servers
Encrypted emails
Government and corporate data
This cryptography is reliable.7 If it is ever broken, we will have much bigger problems than Bitcoin getting hacked.
It is known that quantum computing could eventually break this cryptography. For the sake of this article, I will not go into depth about the problem. Instead, I will create a separate series on this interesting topic. However, I am optimistic that the Bitcoin developer community will come together and solve it.
Conclusion
As you can see, Bitcoin is not easy to hack. The first route has failed to defeat the network, even when serious bugs were found. The second route is too expensive and too large to hide. The third route requires quantum computers powerful enough to break Bitcoin’s cryptography, and those do not exist yet. The Bitcoin network is secure and here to stay. And even if someone finds a way to break Bitcoin, they would only be carrying gold out of fairyland.
Final Word
What do you think is the easiest way to hack Bitcoin?
“Security is a process, not a product.” — Bruce Schneier
Disclaimer:
The information in this publication is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or legal advice. Always do your own research before making any financial decisions. Cryptocurrency investments carry risk, and past performance is not indicative of future results. I actively invest and trade in the crypto markets, and my personal portfolio and holdings change frequently. Nothing I share should be interpreted as a guarantee of performance or a recommendation to buy or sell any asset.
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin?
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident?
https://bitcoincore.org/en/2018/09/20/notice/?
https://braiins.com/blog/how-much-would-it-cost-to-51-attack-bitcoin
https://cryptopotato.com/this-is-how-much-you-would-need-to-spend-to-execute-51-attacks-on-bitcoin-and-ethereum/
https://developer.bitcoin.org/devguide/transactions.html?