This part is not clear to me:
Quote
The total decentralized population of the all owners participate in selecting the most reliable machines to run the network. Those 101 parts have no power over the owners. 101 dispersed redundant parts is a decentralization red herring! Thats not where control lies. Those 101 chosen nodes can be completely reconfigured or replaced by the fully decentralized participating owners in 10 seconds.
How the system of nodes can do it in a coordinated manner if the only reliable comunication channel is controlled by the delegates (and some of them are rogue ones)? A very similar problem is explained here - http://www.links.org/files/decentralised-currencies.pdf (second half of part 3).
Thanks for this reference. Indeed it concludes that the ultimate consensus mechanism lies outside Bitcoin and yet Bitcoin still works! It is this realization that allows practical designs to be achieved that accomplish the true objective of "sufficiently trustless" systems that are immune from the abuses of opaque central control. I particularly liked the exquisitely pragmatic concluding paragraph:
Quote
8 Conclusion
Of course, it is far more likely that Bitcoin has not solved the core problem and is therefore not a decentralised currency. But if it has, I have shown that we could instead save a lot of energy by using an efficient protocol. Alternatively, we could conclude that whilst Bitcoin is not strictly decentralised, it is as good an approximation as we can get. However, we must appreciate that this approximation relies on a certain level of honest behaviour from certain parties, and trust in those parties. If we have such behaviour and trust, why not leverage them in an efficient protocol, instead of burning CPU on proof-ofwork?
Of course, it is far more likely that Bitcoin has not solved the core problem and is therefore not a decentralised currency. But if it has, I have shown that we could instead save a lot of energy by using an efficient protocol. Alternatively, we could conclude that whilst Bitcoin is not strictly decentralised, it is as good an approximation as we can get. However, we must appreciate that this approximation relies on a certain level of honest behaviour from certain parties, and trust in those parties. If we have such behaviour and trust, why not leverage them in an efficient protocol, instead of burning CPU on proof-ofwork?
This is the ultimate point we have been making. It is possible to design systems that work well enough without achieving a theoretically pure solution. We chose to simply explicitly manage where residual trust is being placed.
This is why engineer's always achieve what mathematician's cannot. Mathematicians are stopped from reaching their goals by asymptotes. Engineers know how to get close enough for practical purposes.
