Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: Satoshi didn't solve the Byzantine generals problem
by
smooth
on 09/02/2016, 11:38:12 UTC
Just because you cannot quantify the number of traitors does not mean the system will produce invalid results within the bounds. This is true of any BGP consensus and has absolutely nothing to do with trustless, decentralised solutions.

For Christ's sake, you cause me to repeat all the points I made upthread over and over again.

I already explained to you invalid results where the observers can't know whether the state was attacked or not, which is a Byzantine fault! There is no way to compute this risk and in fact the asymptotic risk is 100% (probability = ~1) because all decentralized consensus systems must centralize (which I explained in detail upthread).

You keep linking that page, and you keep ignoring the statement on that page that says "assuming there are not too many faulty components"

Quote
Whereas, with a quantified probability of traitors (e.g. hardware MTBF), the risk of Byzantine fault is computed. Which was the intent of Lamport et al's paper.

That's not really the case. Read the paper more carefully. Simple probabilistic hardware failure is easy to cope with using redundancy and majority voting. The hard problem is failures that are more subtle and complex, which can mimic deception and collusion.

The algorithm becomes a tool in a toolbox which is used to improve robustness against certain types of failures, but the robustness is still never absolute, and in real systems the actual probability of failure is still not known.