Maybe my wording is exaggerated. But the huge scale you&#x27;d need for a majority attack is the reason it&#x27;s not viable, and the network is designed to encourage mining to drive that scale up.<p>As the wiki points out, potential gains aren&#x27;t total control: you get to reverse transactions but can&#x27;t directly steal coins out of someone else&#x27;s wallet.<p>With a system of independent agents all trying to game the system to make money, it comes down to a cost&#x2F;benefit analysis. If Bitcoin weren&#x27;t designed to have the network scale that it does, the cost of making that attack could be cheap enough for it to be worth doing.<p>But since the mining incentives are made to drive terawatt-hours of energy used in huge datacenters, the attack doesn&#x27;t make economic sense. That&#x27;s what I mean by saying the consensus system is built around having a huge network.