3 ms·

So if a majority of participants (50% + 1 of the network) wanted to say, "rob" the wealthy top 1% of wallets and redistribute wealth by rewriting the history of

• bloominglotus 9y ago
  Technically the unit of measurement is hashing power, rather than % of nodes or participants, but there is an underlying 51% problem with blockchain. The attack surface is similarly limited; they couldn't really "rob" the wealthiest wallets, but they could prevent their transactions from ever happening. They could also spend cryptocurrency they don't really have. Here's an intro: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_computing_power https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_...
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• Dagger2 9y ago
  You can't just transfer money however you like, even if you had complete control of the blockchain. Transactions still need to be signed by the private key of the wallet involved. You could put a transaction with an invalid signature into the blockchain, but then the chain would be rejected by clients because of the invalid transaction.
  • slededit 9y ago
    The clients could be rewritten to accept the "invalid" block. That would cause a fork between the modified and unmodified clients. Like fiat currency, the only thing maintaining the definition of a legal block is the software the majority of the network choose to run.
    • Dagger2 9y ago
      They could indeed, but which users and companies would switch to that forked chain knowing that it's worthless? Having a lot of hashing power doesn't let you control the software that other people are running.