Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: Block lattice
by
TPTB_need_war
on 14/11/2015, 10:05:07 UTC
As monsterer and I have been alluding to up thread

Monsterer and I have been having discussions and you may not be in as much agreement as you believe.

I will wait to see a public post from monsterer if he disagrees with my assessment. Are you referring to private discussions with him? Because in my quick perusal of his public posts in this thread, they seem to be congruent with my points. Feel free to point out a case where you think his points are not congruent with mine.

afaics you have not definitively stated the frame-of-reference—employed by your ("every UTXO output has its own block chain")

Those words are in quotes though it is not factually a quotation.

Perhaps American English is not your native language? I did not quote you. If I did, I would have used the normal forum quoting as I always do. Placing a phrase between double quotes can also mean that the quoted description is an example of how someone might say it (not specifically any person, since the quote was not attributed to any person).

design—for Byzantine fault tolerant consensus

There is no such thing as Byzantine fault tolerance since the byzantine problem is stated in terms of separation of communication a.k.a. network partitioning.  Only after partitions have been merged can a final conclusion be reached for instance bitcoin isn't tolerant against partitioning since if the network was partitioned and each separate segment was generate separate block chains, a conclusion as to which is the longest couldn't be reached until the partitions were merged and the results compared, hence it would no longer by a byzantine problem.  Please read up more on the topic before commenting on them.

Do NOT again write an absurd condescending remark that assumes I hadn't yet researched the fundamental concepts.

Try to remain respectful please (and leave the ad hominem diarrhea aside) as we had been up thread.

I have no idea what rational basis you have told yourself to justify assuming I don't understand the definition of Byzantine fault tolerance. How could I possibly be commenting with so much technical knowledge in your thread if I hadn't yet researched the fundamental concepts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance

Quote
Byzantine fault
 Any fault presenting different symptoms to different observers
Byzantine failure
 The loss of a system service due to a Byzantine fault in systems that require consensus

Your understanding of Byzantine fault tolerance is incorrect. Per the definition above, Bitcoin delivers the same expectations (symptoms) for CAP (consistency, access, and partition tolerance) to all observers which are participants in the longest chain partition. The probability of a failure decreases probabilistically over time as the number of confirmations on the longest chain increases. There are degenerate cases such as the 51% attack where Byzantine failure occurs.

Note the double-spending on a minority chain is not a Byzantine failure, because by definition the minority chain is invalid.

There is no such thing as absolute anything in the universe, thus arguing that Byzantine fault tolerance is not universal is a vacuous assertion. Byzantine fault tolerance is defined for a system and the defined objectivity of the system, not for universal absolutism.

, so I have now expended the time to research, think, and hopefully correctly define it.  Your design's frame-of-reference for Byzantine fault tolerant consensus is majority of the vote by the "voters" which have locked a suitable amount of coins (value). We must determine the (game theory) objectivity of this frame-of-reference and the impacts within the CAP theorem.

Again, the CAP theorem states that all three states cannot simultaneously be achieved so by the nature that RaiBlocks, in addition to any crypto currency, does not claim it can operate while partitioned, this means at most we're claiming 2 out of 3 which by definition satisfies the CAP theorem and no cryptocurrency out there is violating it.  Please read more before commenting.

This ad hominem noise again.

Yet another vacuous argument demonstrating that you do not understand that Bitcoin is partition tolerant within its Byzantine fault tolerant objectivity. Byzantine fault tolerance doesn't mean that CAP has to be fulfilled for those observers who are ignoring the longest chain rule or who are unwilling to accept the probabilitistic nature of the expectations (and thus the fault tolerance). Within Bitcoin's objectivity of the longest chain, all three of the CAP attributes are attained. And my criticisms of your design are about its ill-defined objectivity.

Let this technical rebuttal be instructive to you on the fact that my skills/expertise/research in this area are higher than you apparently assume (given your condescending remarks and your continual unwillingness to accept that 3 experts gmaxwell, monsterer, and myself have come into your thread and graciously tried to explain that your design has serious flaws).

The rest of your reply really seemed to start going off the rails of rational logic. But I will try to find the desire to reply to it point-by-point after I cool down from the lashing of your condescending assumptions above.