Security budget of the Cardano project

Security is one of the key features of public networks that strive for public trust and higher adoption. In this article, we’ll cover the security budget as it is described within Bitcoin and we will tell you how expensive it can be to attack the Cardano consensus.

Storing of wealth in the physical world.

What is network security?

The protocol must be resilient to short-term attacks and keep the ledger immutable in the long term. In other words, the protocol must be able to prevent or be able to recover from short-term attacks. In many cases, short-term attack prevention alone is enough to keep the network secure in the long run.

The attacker usually targets the ongoing consensus and is trying to gain a stronger position than that of honest actors. For this purpose, it needs to obtain the necessary means of attack, which are expensive.

As a short-term attack, you might think of trying to spend one coin twice (double-spend attack), attacking the end of the blockchain. An attack on the immutability of a blockchain would be an attempt to rewrite multiple blocks deeper in blockchain’s history. This type of attack would be much more expensive or it would require more sophisticated tactics.

In the article, we will only deal with the prevention of short-term attacks and only from the economic point of view…