Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Technical Support
Re: Bitcoin Nodes General Inquiry + Bitcoin Core help
by
bob123
on 18/12/2017, 19:20:33 UTC
I see that forks are made if 51% of nodes give the consensus, but if you make 1kk (1'000'000) virtual machines with bitcoin core, and those are the 51% You could actually submit a bip and get it verified instantly leading the possibility to adopt a new change that could affect and steal everyone's bitcoins or make an actual change that everyone pays a default fee to the attacker's address?

The 51% attack is regarded as successfull if you can compromise/gain control over 51% of the networks computation power (here: hash rate).
So your 1.000.000 virtual machines would be useless until they had hosting machines which would raise those 51% of the total hash rate (in this case 1 host theoretically would be enough.
Currently the hashrate is at about 8,481,426,000 GH/s (Source: https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty).