[ethagknight]

I remember reading that a key weakness to bitcoin was its susceptibility to fraud if a group of nefarious miners control a significant portion of compute power on chain, because verification is based on consensus. As such, a properly motivated bad actor can produce fraudulent results that can only be disproven by exorbitant compute resources. Obviously this would destroy the value of btc but they only need to keep it going long enough to cash out. If mining is heavily focused in certain areas of extensively overbuilt power generation centers (rural China) using mass custom ASICs, then it sounds to me like Bitcoin has a fundamental flaw in its market realities.

GRANTED: more severe opportunities for fraud, unfairness and bad acting are available to Wall Street

NOTE: I find bitcoin fascinating and I really want it to work, but it has seriously flaws that aren’t being seriously acknowledged by the people willing to buy in at $15,000+ per BTC. Not trying to be a naysayer to crypto currency

[gtrubetskoy]

What we are learning is that there are far easier ways to steal bitcoin than the so-called 51% attack. Miner collusion would be so expensive to pull off and the amount of money you can steal this way is not that great - you still need the elliptic curve signatures to verify, so the only thing you can really do is "double spend" the bitcoin that you need to have in the first place.

[eternalban]

> steal bitcoin

Denial of service. Should the +51% choose, they can simply ignore certain transactions and those will never end up on the chain.

Our fiat private finance system does concentrate weatlh, but DOS attacks are only possible by subverting the legal regime.

[Shoothe]

51% attack does not allow stealing other's coin but it allows forbidding you from using them (your transactions will not be mined). See [0].

[0]: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/658/what-can-an-...

[sova]

Yes, the initial paragraph of the bitcoin paper (bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf) says that as long as 51% of the network is not attacking the network (that is, trying to forge their own, new, transaction history) the protocol is safe. Even when 51% of mining power is concentrated in the hands of a group, there is still a lot of reverse engineering to do to try and inject your own blocks as history. So far I have seen no demonstrable way to do this. If anyone is aware of research in this area I'd be interested to see how far it has come along.