Apologies to harp on this thread, but it would be sneaky if I added this as an edit to a prior post.

Zerotime is a very significant claim. When you make bold claims that have the potential to seriously challenge Bitcoin, you will be held to a higher standard of scholarly proof.

Indeed the necessary proofs can be explained with math, computer science, and networking research.

Einstein said you don't really know something until you can explain it to a n00b.

The only ways I know of to squelch DoS and Sybil attacks are:

• Participant expends resources.
• Participant must have a reputation.
• Participant performance can be measured.

I already stated that I don't know how to do #3 for his proposed lock protocol, because there is no verified correct vote on a lock. Disagreement isn't a verified crime in this protocol.

I already stated that I don't know how to do #1 for his protocol, because transaction fees can't be taken in the lock stalemate case where Sybil attack applies. Others suggested burning resources (I assume the voting nodes) and I responded saying which nodes would participate in voting if they must burn resources? If instead you require every transaction to burn or include a proof-of-work hash or fee, then the innocent spender is penalized by any lock stalemate.

So that leaves us with reputation. But again how do we measure performance in order to assign reputation? And then there are other problems with reputation.

There is a reason that solving the Byzantine Generals Problem remained unsolved until Satoshi invented proof-of-work. The problem is essentially that there is no reference point, because either value is correct and incorrect at the same time (e.g. lock or not lock) because we can't prove the network is reliable.

It is as if John isn't aware of how significant Satoshi's accomplishment was. Or somehow John thinks he has a clever improvement, but hasn't yet proven it to us.

Btw, I think I have a solution of how to achieve zerotime. But I do it an entirely different way and my solution doesn't require all peers to see all transactions, so even if John fixes his, I've still got him beat (assuming my white paper comes together which is not finished yet).