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by hackinthebochs 1671 days ago
It provides "distributed trust", in the sense that you know no single person or group is in control and you trust the distributed consensus, in terms of ledger state and algorithm accuracy.
2 comments

I'm not fully up to speed but are modern blockchains still susceptible to a 51% attack?
Current PoW chains, yes. Some other consensus schemes have higher threshold requirements to pull off a similar sort of attack, in particular you can look at Casper FFG and other byzantine fault tolerant PoS schemes.

There are some with lower threshold tolerance of these attacks based on the idea that they're unlikely and the added threshold doesn't actually add security. I don't know about that but some people seem to think so.

Maybe no single entity is literally in full control but large mining pools and the developers of the software both have extreme influence over the chain.