It's the safest, oldest, most tested blockchain out there. You can't beat that.
The point of mining is to prevent double spend attacks. It does this in a rather brute-force way: the network as a whole always maintains a higher hashrate than any attacker. The network always out-spends the attacker to maintain security. As described in my prior comment the funding for this massive hashrate comes from newly generated BTC.
But Bitcoin is designed to wean itself off of emitting new coins as a mining reward. This is done by halving the block reward arbitrarily every 4 years. This is necessary to fulfill the promise that there will only ever be 21M coins, which has been a huge selling point to anti-inflation investors.
Ultimately the mining is supposed to be funded entirely by fees. But there is no market mechanism to ensure that fees "make up for" the lost emissions of new coins. The only reason to pay a high transaction fee is if there is high transaction volume, causing blocks to fill up, so you are competing for space with other people trying to make transactions. If transaction volume is fairly low, fees remain low. You can see fees only become a meaningful part of the reward at times of unusually high volume[0].
So, it seems plausible to me that if Bitcoin mining was funded entirely on transaction fees, the total mining reward would not be high enough to sustain enough hashrate to be impervious to 51% by a powerful attacker. That's especially true if most users are holding onto BTC as a store of value not attempting to transact in it. As far as I know, there is no successful cryptocurrency that functions using fees alone. Bitcoin is in a very slow march towards being the first to do that.
Basically the network is currently funded with a "tax" on holders of BTC -- newly generated coins dilute the value of held coins. This to me makes a lot of sense for a store-of-value. But the coin is trying to transition to funding security with a "tax" on users of BTC. Nobody really knows whether this will work. In fact nobody knows how much is the "correct" amount for the network to spend on mining at all. All we know is that with the current level of spending we haven't had a 51% attack yet. Are we spending 2x more than needed? 10x? 100x? It's impossible to say but the design of BTC seems like a slowwwww experiment to find the level at which it fails.
BUT - that is only due to the increase in purchasing power of BTC. At the last halving in May 2020, BTC was trading at 8-9K, so at its current value of 28K "half" the BTC is still worth MORE. In real terms the block reward has gone up, not down. And so has the hashrate.
A BTC maximalist might say that the price increases because of the halving and this will continue for all future halvings, making the real-world value of the block reward approximately consistent over the next few decades. I doubt it, because each halving should have less and less impact on the price. There are millions of BTC already mined and actively trading so is the price really going to double when we go from making 900 new ones per day to 450 new ones per day? And down the road, from 450 new ones to 225? And so on? Eventually the newly mined BTC are such a drop in the bucket compared to the already-mined ones being traded, that a reduction in emission cannot have much impact on price. I don't believe the theory that the halving was responsible for the last pump either. I think it's more the market conditions during the pandemic that encouraged speculation.
But just for fun let's pretend that this does happen. The price doubles (give or take) after each halving to maintain the real world value of the block reward. In that case it could theoretically work all the way up until the very last halving takes the reward to 0. Because the fees people are willing to pay are still going to be on the level of "a piece of candy" for a transaction. Whatever that translates to in BTC. Scaling up the real-world value of BTC works for magnifying the block reward which is denominated in a fixed amount of BTC, but not for magnifying the fees which are just a bidding war and not fixed value.
And really, it would fail a bit before then because long before the final halving, you already have ultra-low rewards denominated in Satoshi. You couldn't scale Bitcoin's real world value enough to make those one or two digit SAT rewards mean anything, without also making it totally unusable for ordinary transactions!
(not a stakeholder myself, so this is only an outside view opinion)
Serious scrutiny of how exactly the hash rate in Bitcoin is generated would not reflect well on the ecosystem, because of the amount of outright corruption involved, as well as theft, that goes back a decade. A couple years ago an operation was uncovered in Thailand where something on the order of 100 million dollars worth of mining equipment had been found burning stolen electricity from government enterprises, IIRC primarily public schools, and one of the investigators involved speculated that this was likely less than 10% of the illegal mining that was happening in their country, let alone the recognized legal stuff.
Consider that similar things are happening all over the world, not just Thailand, and even entire countries (DPRK) participating due to total systemic corruption crossed with no questiins asked access to natural resources and national treasuries, to be spent in any way they choose, and an investment in destabilizing the world economy - or at least evading financial controls - is well worth the cost of subsidizing mining both within their borders and beyond. You've also got quasi crackpots in charge of places like the government of El Salvador who are also helping to support this ecosystem.
Miners, I will conjecture without offering any support on the bet that eventually this will be found out and publicized, have been sitting on a warchest of nearly free coins mined long ago, when almost nobody was looking for corruption or theft of resources, and when block rewards were multiples higher to boot. The argument that miners have barely made a profit because of the adjustable difficulty level has always been an open lie due to a willingness to completely disregard the mining done using off market access to electricity and facilities, which was rampant in the early days and is still a significant chunk of the hash rate even today.
Miners can continue to slow sell their coin bases because they have effectively paid for them for over a decade at a massive discount to "market," and since the only major source of downward price pressure are the miners themselves, they can prop the price up for as long as they like by simply selling fewer coins into the market whenever there is an adverse social signal that they need to counter with a " honey badger of money doesn't care" price signal.
I don't recall the keywords to find the bust I was talking about from a couple years ago (2019 or so) which was explicitly targeting Bitcoin mining, (not eth or some other altcoin) but it turns out I didn't have to because in the past 2 years alone there have been two _more_ busts of electricity stealing crypto gangs, in thailand alone, collectively of a similar scale to the one I was referring to. By the evidence tables they appear to have been using slightly older antminers, what looks like a mix of s9, s17 (distinctive plug/fan layout), maybe s19 vintages, so although they don't say so in the articles this was almost certainly Bitcoin (or just as bad, BCH) being mined.
2022: https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/2455120/thousan...
2023: (much smaller scale than above but still stealing over USD $150000 a year in electricity)
https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/2569745/crypto-...
This time around the authorities estimate that they've only found 1%, not 10% as they had before, of the illegal mining done in their country. Perhaps the mining bans in Vietnam and China have triggered an influx of even more illegal activity into neighvoring states. This is the dirtiest secret in Bitcoin, bar none, and the conveniently suspicion-deflecting narrative that miners barely make profit is a straight up lie. This is just one of the many reasons its earning the name klepto-currency.
Sure, some upstart miners, the ones who foolishly attempt to operate completely above board may be in that position but they are not the handful of quiet established operations that have been around for 5, or even 10 years, and who have longstanding ties both to one another and to pool operators who help conceal the illegal portions of the hash rate they control. Thus is substantially the reason that miners can survive downward price pressure, since they themselves are the main source of it. But you're perhaps one of these hopeless cases who actually believes all or even a majority of the volume on exchanges is real as well.
The amount of bad participation is negligible compared to the whole; the benefits are well-catalogued in places where it works under a legal regime. Your commentary about the attempt to destabilize the world economy has no legs and no justification aside from bald assertions, and in any event is directly contradictory to literally every academic estimation of the size of Bitcoin's black market going back to literally its first participant, being Silk Road v1, which even at the very beginning of Bitcoin represented only a tiny, tiny fraction of the otherwise legitimate economy.
Your assertion about the nature of miner profitability even internal to the assertion itself is a completely contradictory lie, since it can only be true if both miners are somehow ultra-profitable due to theft, but also not profitable at all and is thus a lie.
The mining conglomerates and larger operators and their profit in your assertions are clownish strawmen that have nothing to do with reality, and you are ignoring high-quality analyses of majority hashrate, their location, their energy use and source of energy, and ignoring the fact that literally hundreds of millions of people worldwide find positive value in Bitcoin's existence, and smacks of an oppressive first-world privileged hypocrisy and failure in value judgement.
Still 4 transactions per second?
So there may be a lot of wash trading and games played with stablecoins trying to prop up the price, but there also must be enough real buyers to purchase the 6.25 BTC (~$175k) generated every 10 minutes. Otherwise the miners would not be able to pay their bills (surely owed in Real Money), would shut down, and we would see evidence of that in the network's hashrate plummeting.