Quote from: smooth on February 09, 2016, 09:32:07 AM

I call it a condition rather than a precondition because in some setups it is clear that the former is more useful. For example, a safety control system may specify that it continue to function properly as long as <1/3 of its components fail.

Yes the Lamport et al BGP paper was focused on cases where failure rates (where traitors are faulty components/nodes) can be conjectured (c.f. the end of the paper), not on Sybil attacks in a decentralized setting.

Quote from: monsterer on February 09, 2016, 10:37:50 AM

Quote from: TPTB_need_war on February 09, 2016, 08:45:53 AM

There is no decentralized solution to the BGP problem. Period.

For a moment, just consider this; you are saying that there is no solution to BGP in trustless anonymous systems, but: If you take a snapshot of the current bitcoin hash rate and equally divide it out between N generals of fixed and equal hash rate, this is now classical BGP. You must be forced to concede that you are in fact saying that there is no solution to BGP at all, which is clearly false.

You are conflating the decentralized, trustless, Sybil attackable scenario with the scenarios where the precondition can be conjectured probabilistically and thus where Lamport's "solution" has quantitative merit/utility as I stated:

Quote from: TPTB_need_war on February 09, 2016, 10:40:12 AM

And that it is conditional, is why I rebutted smooth upthread that he was stating the problemnot the solutionin the decentralized context because the count can only be conjectured (e.g. probabilistic estimates of hardware failure which was the focus of the paper) in a centralized (non-Sybil attacked application).