• endless_nameless@lemmy.world
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    6 days 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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      6 days 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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        5 days 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?

        • Matty Roses@lemmy.today
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          5 days ago

          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.

      • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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        5 days ago

        Can’t you just split it up into however many wallets you want? If you’re rich that seems like basic security.