Bitcoin has always been the go-to crypto for thought experiments and many have finally started to speculate on evolving a new use-case using those experiments. BTC has been sprinting towards its halving and it is marking new and new heights in terms of price lately, but what if BTC was no crypto at all, but a country?
According to Ryan Watkins’ latest observations, Bitcoin paid its miners over $5.2 billion in 2019 to secure its network. Miners and hashrate act as a strong line of defense against attacks and hacks in the Bitcoin network, with Watkins equating this vast amount paid for network safety to a country’s annual defense spending. As per the Messari Crypto exec, if Bitcoin were a country, it would be placed at the 41st position in terms of its annual defense spending.
Source: Messari
While there have been debates about mining being security or not, there is a lot of weight placed on the side of miners and hashrate making up Bitcoin’s network security. For instance, after the Bitcoin Cash [BCH] and Bitcoin SV [BSV] fork, the hashrate fell to a dangerous level, which indicated a 51% attack possible on the blockchains. However, in the case of Bitcoin, the miners have always held up the network and the block rewards received by them is, in turn, added to the network security.
However, where the point of decentralization is concerned, Bitcoin has been a prime example of a decentralized cryptocurrency. But, its ecosystem has still been dependant on numerous outside factors for funding. Some changes to its block reward allocation and the entry of a treasury to save a portion of BTC may help it solve the dependence issue.
If Bitcoin followed a similar funding reward system as Dash’s, according to the researchers’ calculation, it could have spent a sum of $1.6 billion on its ecosystem and nearly $500 million in 2019.
Source: Messari
With increased funding, Bitcoin could turn self-sufficient and fund itself into perpetuity, while enabling its economy to flourish without an outside entity. In fact, this would allow BTC to be the ultimate form of blockchain sovereignty and unadulterated autonomy.
However, since Bitcoin does not have a different rewards allocation system in place, this would be just a theory that will need testing in real-time. This system appeared plausible for a small community with low stakes involved. But for something as big as Bitcoin, the stakes are as high as in billions and large global decisions could become easily contentious.
Meanwhile, BTC’s defense against the dark arts appeared to be holding up, even though the hashrate suffered a minimal drop recently. The hashrate, at press time, stood at 111.63m TH/s, while the difficulty has been climbing to pre-adjustment levels of 15.959t.
Source: CoinMetrics
