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Comment by swenger | Hacker News Reader

A blockchain doesn’t provide trust, though. A person who doesn’t understand technology doesn’t trust a distributed ledger, but they do trust their centralised bank because it’s regulated.

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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.

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.

I would question how much of the layperson's trust is due to bank regulation and how much is due to familiarity.

Probably nearly 100% due to regulation.

There are plenty of non-tech people with investments in crypto that would disagree with you. Also, some exchanges are FDIC insured.

They do though. A very small percentage of current holders of crypto have an understanding of the technology.

Trust will (continue to) come with time.

You sound privileged enough to have access to a reliable and trustworthy bank. Many, many people aren't as lucky.

So this person lives in a place they can't trust banks...

But they have access to computers, internet, enough money to pay the tx fees of cryptocurrencies... amazing

Less snark would be preferred to elicit a response, but yes- there are more cheap computers than people in the world, and smart phones are near ubiquitous even in very poor places. You simply don't have the life experiences to make this criticism. i.e. PRIVILEGE

Don't forget enough tech expertise to be able to use any of this crap in any "decentralized" way (if they all just use coinbase, where is that decentralization?)

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