this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
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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?
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.
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.
What if the 51% have already completed the consensus process?