How To Steal Bitcoin: The Landauer Attack
Bitcoin's base layer was designed as a minimal, thermodynamically efficient ledger for value transfer. Over the past decade, a sequence of protocol changes and narrative shifts has progressively loaded the chain with non-payment data and institutional dependency. This report applies Landauer's principle, the thermodynamic cost of information, to Bitcoin's governance history, identifying a pattern of incremental complexity addition that threatens the protocol's core function as censorship-resistant money. The pattern is not hypothetical. It is documented in protocol commit histories, DOJ-released Epstein files, ETF prospectus language, and the public statements of the actors involved. The August 2026 BIP-110 activation window represents the first organized attempt to reverse this trajectory, and the institutional response to it reveals which actors benefit from the accumulated complexity.
