David Schwartz, the former chief technology officer of Ripple, has a blunt answer for anyone worried that Bitcoin miners might go rogue: they can't, because the people who actually value the chain can fork it and leave them holding expensive paperweights. In a series of posts this week, Schwartz argued that economic nodes — exchanges, custodians, wallets, payment firms — hold the real leverage over miners, since a chain nobody values pays nothing. He also dismissed claims that the recent BIP-110 fight was an attack on Bitcoin, calling that talk nonsense.
The fork as a deterrent
Schwartz's logic is straightforward. Satoshi Nakamoto's design assumes an honest majority — the longest chain wins, and honest nodes outpace attackers if they control most of the computing power. But the deeper check on miner behavior, he says, is that economic nodes run the software that accepts or rejects blocks. If miners misbehave, those nodes can fork the chain and change the mining algorithm. That would strand warehouses of ASICs, which compute only one hashing function, and gut their resale value. Miners have sunk billions into hardware that would become, in Schwartz's words, space heaters.
It's a neat argument, and it shifts the security debate away from raw hash power toward the coordination of the businesses that actually use Bitcoin. The deterrent only works if those nodes react fast and in unison. Whether that coordination holds under real pressure is untested.
A record slump
The timing isn't great. Bitcoin's hash rate has slumped for a record nine months as miners pivot to AI, and difficulty turned negative for only the second time. That's a shrinking security budget, and it's exactly the kind of environment where the threat of a 51% attack starts to feel less theoretical.
Justin Bons, founder of Cyber Capital, argues that a shrinking security budget raises the odds of a 51% attack over the next decade. Patrick Shyu, a former Meta engineer, points to decaying miner rewards as a comparable threat. Neither is predicting an imminent attack, but both see the trend line moving the wrong way.
BIP-110 and OCEAN
The recent BIP-110 episode shows how messy miner politics can get. The proposal, which would restrict certain transaction types, pushed a minority chain that stalled after two blocks. Its backers still target September 1 for a proof-of-work change. Schwartz dismissed the attack claims around the fight as nonsense, but the episode exposed real friction.
Separately, mining pool OCEAN redirected customer hashrate without clear consent, drew criticism, and miners called for leadership changes. That's not a security breach, but it's a reminder that miners are businesses with their own incentives — and that the social contract between pools and their users can fray.
The untested coordination
Schwartz's argument rests on a bet: that exchanges, custodians, and payment firms would actually coordinate a fork in a crisis. That's a big if. These are competitors, often with different legal obligations and customer bases. Getting them to move together on a contentious fork would be a logistical and political nightmare.
So the real question isn't whether miners are honest. It's whether the economic nodes that would punish them are willing to act. That's a question nobody has answered yet — and the record hash rate slump means it might get asked sooner rather than later.
