Bitcoin
BTC Launched 2009Proof-of-Work (SHA-256)
18/100
ProtoLedger Index
Bitcoin
Bitcoin
Post-Quantum
Privacy
Governance
Bitcoin is the original peer-to-peer electronic cash system. It achieves trustlessness and reasonable decentralisation through Proof-of-Work consensus, but scores poorly on privacy, post-quantum security, governance, and MEV resistance — all of which were either unsolved problems in 2008 or were deliberately excluded from the design.
Principle Breakdown
P1 — Trustlessness
8/10
Bitcoin's PoW achieves genuine trustlessness — no admin keys, no foundation with upgrade authority in the consensus layer. Scores well here.
Mining is concentrated in 4-5 large pools. Geographic concentration in specific jurisdictions is a structural risk. Nakamoto Coefficient for mining is approximately 4.
ECDSA only. No PQC roadmap has been published. Every Bitcoin UTXO is vulnerable to a quantum adversary with sufficient capability.
Every transaction is fully public. Amount, sender, and receiver are visible on-chain. CoinJoin provides optional but weak privacy with a small anonymity set.
Six-confirmation convention is probabilistic, not deterministic. A 51% attack is always theoretically possible and has occurred on smaller PoW chains.
Bitcoin mining consumes approximately 120 TWh annually — comparable to a mid-sized country. Energy expenditure produces no useful computation beyond the hash itself.
The Bitcoin protocol is specified in natural language (the whitepaper and BIPs). No formal TLA+ specification exists for the full protocol.
Governance by BIP process, developer discussion, and miner signalling. The blocksize wars demonstrated how this concentrates effective upgrade authority.
P9 — MEV Resistance
2/10
Transaction ordering is by fee. Miners can and do reorder transactions. No structural MEV protection exists.
No identity system. Governance is token-free (PoW) but effectively controlled by mining pools and core developers.