i read long ago all it takes is a democratic majority (as it's called) ... i call 51% a civil war victory actually but i suppose if you're on the winning side of the receiving end of billions of lobbymoney you would call 51% a landslide avalanche too.
As i got it more or less, it's basically like torrenting, only with seeders only, not leechers because you need a whole blockchain or you can't validate (i might be missing a few bits over more than 10 years of the death of Satoshi Nakamoto ofcourse)
from tfa
*People have also found creative ways to cheat. Emin Gün Sirer and his colleagues at Cornell University have shown that there is a way to subvert a blockchain even if you have less than half the mining power of the other miners. The details are somewhat technical, but essentially a “selfish miner” can gain an unfair advantage by fooling other nodes into wasting time on already-solved crypto-puzzles.
Another possibility is an “eclipse attack.” Nodes on the blockchain must remain in constant communication in order to compare data. An attacker who manages to take control of one node’s communications and fool it into accepting false data that appears to come from the rest of the network can trick it into wasting resources or confirming fake transactions.
Finally, no matter how tamperproof a blockchain protocol is, it “does not exist in a vacuum,” says Sirer. The cryptocurrency hacks driving recent headlines are usually failures at places where blockchain systems connect with the real world—for example, in software clients and third-party applications. *
well the wallets for instance ... if you use a tool like jaxx you can go guessing, brutally because they only use real words for the mnemonic phrases, which means altering one letter in one word into another dictionary word might already get you into another wallet ... it sounds way less scary than it actually is for instance
(i'll try not to use words in my own phrases haha) if you had "curl" and you replace it with "curb" an leave ALL THE OTHER WORDS as is , you might find yourself actually able to 'unlock' which gets you into another wallet which might or might not have data stored in it ... which lets you do whatever you want since the pin code is actually only local, means if you install a wallet with a phrase you know on another device, you don't need the pincode to do transfers .. this is basically common knowledge but nothing has been done about it yet
i can assure you, if little old retard-me gets this, l33t blackhat overthere has gotten that a long time ago so me telling you does not empower him or her to do so since its very unlikely that they couldnt already have done so ...
and more ... in TFA ... transactions are hard, coins in transaction are untouchable basically so if you could keep your coin moving constantly it would be safe, but transaction fees (which i think werent supposed to be there as decreed by the one true god of crypto) make that impossible ofcourse since you would get some kind of
entropy in closed systems leaking energy over time
oh well ... only worries for whales, right ?
there's more, WAY more, even in a read only ledger the data is only as trusted as the one entering it ... if you want fake records, you just hold a gun to the head of the guy typing, so governments could adopt it after all, then claim it to be "unhackable" while it was already corrupt by the time it touched the keyboard
there's always ways, ... always
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610836/how-secure-is-blockchain-really/
(image from respective site)
