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You can't steal money with a 51% attack, only take back your own. You also can't force a rule change / hard fork.

• grey-area 10y ago
  Can't you double spend? You might not be stealing money, but you'd be stealing goods/services by using money twice. If so you're being really disingenuous saying you can't steal money. Also, it doesn't really take 51%, that's an arbitrary figure, it depends on how many confirmations your adversary is using, and is just a probability, so 40% would probably do in some cases, there is no magical threshold of 51%. Glad you brought up rule changes, as that's another area where a small group or groups can control blockchains, giving the lie to the idea of a completely distributed consensus - in practice the rules are only as distributed as those willing and able to develop clients (which is a very small group), so that small group have de-facto control of the network.