but, is it possible, really more accurately was it possible, that a small group of people, focusing enough hashing power, to force a false consensus by supporting whichever fork and applying a vast amount of mining/hashing the their preferred fork. obviously this could not happen now with a very high difficulty, but with an earlier scenario, when things like cpu mining paid, or with a newer alt coin, can you substitute computing power for popular opinion
In the case of a hard fork, that wouldn't work. A hard fork requires an overwhelming majority of all users to run supporting software. Notice that I said "users". Not miners, not hashpower, users. That includes wallet creators, full nodes, merchants, and consumers. This is because full nodes, and wallets will simply ignore any and all blocks that don't match their consensus rules, regardless of the amount of hashpower used to solve the block.
In the case of a soft fork, they could temporarily enforce their new consensus until they ran out of money and stopped hashing (at which point the old rules would return). If the majority of the users didn't like the new rules being enforced, they could potentially create a hard fork that blocks those new rules.
i had thought that was the case, but it seemed that at some point in the past couple years i had heard a reference to changes in the consensus rule set that put the power of choice more in the nodes and exchanges. something you just said put my wrong hash power creating consensus into perspective. the mining and hashing power is nothing more than something/someone submitting wrong hash keys, eventually the right key is found on a given block and it is solved. the code itself doesn't care how many wrong tries it took, only that it was solved and how long it took.
