Consensus attacks
It is important to mention one more thing about consensus attacks with regards to their potential impact. Such attacks can potentially disrupt the security of decentralized governance and availability of the network, but they cannot steal or spend other people's funds. This is because the only way to control funds on the blockchain is through private keys, which we covered in Chapter 5, Five Forces of Bitcoin – #2 Cryptography. Any potential consensus attackers can only manipulate their own transactions on the blockchain, and possibly create double-spent transactions with their own funds.
Now we've covered the decentralized consensus mechanism that provides security of the protocol by design. The Bitcoin blockchain architecture ...
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