• Cenotaph@mander.xyz
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    4 months ago

    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/

    • endless_nameless@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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

      • Matty Roses@lemmy.today
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        4 months ago

        That’s PoW. With PoS, it is coin ownership.

        Which is much more distributed than computing power.

        • kwarg@mander.xyz
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          4 months ago

          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?