this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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Immutable so long as no one party or group owns more than half of the coins on a given blockchain... then the ledger is whatever they say it is and it propagates down because they can manufacture their own "consensus".
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/51-attack.asp
and most use cases around things like "smart contracts" end up still requiring a trusted third party at some point
https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/the-inevitability-of-trusted-third-parties/
It's not 51% of the coins, it's 51% of the computing power on the network. Both of which are virtually impossible in the case of Bitcoin, though not entirely impossible. I just wouldn't consider a 51% attack even remotely a threat to the network compared to something like government crackdown
That's PoW. With PoS, it is coin ownership.
Which is much more distributed than computing power.
Correct, and this post is about Bitcoin, which is PoW.
I'm not an expert, but I never understood why people would prefer PoS over PoW. Indeed, the latter requires to "waste" larger amounts of energy, but doesn't PoS favor rich groups of people colluding against the blockchain timeline?
Let's think about this. Ethereums total market cap is $325b, if you tried to buy anywhere near half the market cap, you would drive the price up so egregiously that not even the US Government could probably afford it, and so many people would get suspicious and stop selling, that it likely would be impossible....but, even if you could, the action of falsifying even 1 transaction and getting caught would absolutely wreck the entire value of the chain driving it to zero. So you would have to spend probably on the order of $1 trillion dollars or more to effectively delete your money.
The only reason that would ever happen, and this would be quite the extreme, is if a large government like the US or China, saw it as so much of a threat, that they would go to this length instead of just banning it and letting it fizzle out.
Even if an entity could throw away $1T, there are many other ways to devalue crypto or make it untrustworthy. $1b of thugs, propaganda, and lobbying is way way more effective.
Not anymore than PoW, which requires specialized hardware that can't be repurposed for other uses (and thus requires money to enter). I'm not sure if is still true, but I believe at one point less than 10 companies had over 51% of the BTC network.
Because ownership tends to be much more evenly distributed than ACIS ownership, it makes it harder to collude - you have to have 51% of all coins that are staked (and smaller owners generally pool to stake as well). In addition, a move to collude would almost instantly destroy the value of the staked coin (though maybe not assets tokenized on it), providing another incentive against it.
Can't you just split it up into however many wallets you want? If you're rich that seems like basic security.
No, the community controls the consensus through their nodes. A 51% attack only allows the attacker to perform:
In the event of a 51% attack the community can fork the chain - change the consensus and implement preventive measures like changing the mining algorithm, changing to PoW/PoS, banning all of the attackers coins, implementing a finality layer or a checkpoiting system etc.
You are making my point. Blockchain is not crypto. Blockchain can be useful in private, internal use cases (like a transaction ledger for bank branches) where trust is largely implicit.
If you have trust, why do you need a blockchain?
Distributed / immutable databases are not solely a feature of blockchain either.
It's a very interesting thing in a vacuum. Basically any application of it so far (with the possible exception of the original one, if it weren't just a speculation investment machine at the moment) runs into the problem where it has to interact with reality at some point. And most of the problems Blockchains solve are already solved by a variety of other systems, for less time/currency/hardware investment.
Because it's an immutable ledger, not just a database. It maintains a history of every previous transaction/entry. Blockchains are used by banks and in the supply chain because it makes backtracing and identifying discrepancies trivial. For things like cryptocurrency, blockchains allow "don't trust, verify" but for something where you already have trust, they allow "trust but verify"
Cryptographically immutable append only ledgers (aka merkel trees) have existed since at least 1979. A blockchain is different because it has distributed consensus. If your consensus algorithm is trust, then it's not a fucking blockchain.
A blockchain is nothing more than a data structure. It's essentially a linked list using the hash of the previous block. Distributed consensus is something blockchains are useful for, but it doesn't define it
No, that's a Merkel tree. Been around since 1979.
Nah, you can pretty easily define a Blockchain as a special case of a Merkel tree with a distributed consensus method.
Here, I provided a bunch of examples months ago of other ways blockchain is being used: https://lemmy.world/post/36683795/19677963