I was bored the other day and so I did some calculations to see if it is possible for the Middle East to shut down the Bitcoin network if it wanted to.
So the Middle East has about 1 trillion barrels of oil reserves. However, it only produces about 30 million barrels of oil per day (since not all the oil in the ground is taken out at once).
A single barrel of oil can be harnessed to produce about 1.7 megawatts of electricity. Therefore, 30 million barrels of oil is equal to about 51 terawatts.
A current state-of-the-art miner such as the Antminer S5 uses just 0.51 watts per GH/s. If the Middle East decided to shut down oil exports and consumption for one day and instead dedicated it all towards attacking Bitcoin, 51 terawatts of electricity would be enough to supply a total hashrate of exactly 100 billion terahashes. The current hashrate of the Bitcoin network is roughly about 300,000 terahashes. This would give the Middle East about 99.9997 percent of the total hashrate of the entire network.
You can also do the same calculations for other countries and groups of countries too. See how much electricity they consume and then imagine if they dedicated all of that towards attacking Bitcoin. OK, so maybe not all of the electricity used in one day would be used to attack Bitcoin in a hypothetical attack scenario but even if a medium sized nation decided to dedicate only 10 percent of its typical per-day electrical consumption towards performing an attack, the results are still pretty terrifying.
it could be. But the protocol of bitcoin will evolve.
