• hddsx@lemmy.ca
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    19 days ago

    Can’t you takeover a blockchain by owning the majority of a block chain, or by having a majority of the processing power to compute hashes?

    • KazuyaDarklight@lemmy.world
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      19 days ago

      Yes which is part of why the major chains are owned and controlled by companies, but then that makes the whole thing pointless. IMO, a company controlled blockchain may as well just be a DB cluster, it would be faster and more efficient.

      • hddsx@lemmy.ca
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        19 days ago

        Are you saying that they “solve” that by never giving up more than 49% stake?

        That… seems like a bad solution

    • DannyBoy@sh.itjust.works
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      19 days ago

      If you had 51% of the world’s computing power (to blockchains using proof of work) yes you could forge records, from what I could wrap my head around about blockchains.

      • Strykker@programming.dev
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        19 days ago

        You don’t need 51% of the world’s power though, just 51% of the power of people who care about how the system works. Most people using block chain cryptos don’t care at all, so the threshold is a tiny percentage of the user base.

        • DannyBoy@sh.itjust.works
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          19 days ago

          Yeah you’re right. I was thinking specifically Bitcoin and the astronomical amount of compute power that’s behind it.

        • hddsx@lemmy.ca
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          19 days ago

          That’s proof of work. Proof of stake is you just need more than everyone else, right?

          • ConnecticutKen@lemmy.world
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            19 days ago

            It works more like loaning money and then receiving interest, except you are loaning crypto to the network and then you get it back, plus some, after a certain period of time

      • ConnecticutKen@lemmy.world
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        19 days ago

        This would just create a fork in the blockchain where 51% of the network doesn’t match the correct state of the blockchain that the 49% have. The 49% would effectively stop working because they could never validate the transactions that the 51% takeover has falsely created. The node operators of the 49% of the network would need to reach consensus for how to deal with the problem, but essentially they would just adopt code that ignores the 51% data, so they could continue to process blocks of transactions. Without manual intervention the 49% would be frozen. The 51% is just fake, they haven’t really changed anything because every real node operator would know it’s false data.