Quote from: monsterer on February 09, 2016, 12:06:18 PM

Quote from: TPTB_need_war on February 09, 2016, 11:57:23 AM

when an inestimable condition for Byzantine fault tolerance is COMBINED with inability to observe faults consistently among all observers, then no state is trustworthy

Your first point is irrelevant because that is the natural state for any byzantine system that we are concerned with. The second point is just plain incorrect, because a byzantine fault is a fork in bitcoin, and all observers can see the fork.

"an inestimable condition for Byzantine fault tolerance" is not an natural state of all applications of byzantine systems as I have explained for example for modeling hardware.

"inability to observe faults consistently among all observers" is correct and is inarguable for BGP as already explained and to which even smooth agreed.

Readers must I continue to refute monsterer because this is impinging on my time? He has been wrong on ever post in this thread lately. I think it is time to put him on Ignore.

Orphaned chains (not sustained forks!) are a natural and can't be proven to be an attack. Even those longer-con chains which orphan another chain which do not fall within the expected variance due to natural orphan rate can't be distinguished from natural (non-attack) network connectivity issues. Also I already explained upthread that an emphemeral fork (which orphans another chain) can't be blamed for a double-spend or censored transaction, because there is no provable correlation. Seems you've forgotten where I had to teach you in my Decentralized thread why it is impossible for a minority chain to prove anything (because the state of the chain is never absolute w.r.t. to any external chain/clock and is always moving forward). Which is the same analogous mistake enet made upthread.

Fuck man, you can't even keep all the concepts in your head from the past discussions!

Quote from: smooth on February 09, 2016, 12:08:44 PM

We covered this earlier monsterer, but I don't agree that observers can necessarily see the fault. If mining is centralized and no one outside of the collusion mines (because it is not economically viable to do so), then there will be no forks.

However, it is accurate to say that if we know there are miners who aren't part of a collusion and we don't see forks that exceed those accounted for by natural propagation, then there is no attack.

Sorry smooth none of that shit is true per what I wrote above to monsterer.

Besides collusion is unknowable due to Sybil attacks.

You guys are chasing your tails in circles.

Quote from: smooth on February 09, 2016, 12:08:44 PM

I believe the bolded condition is a near certainty today, and the italic condition is very likely true.

Therefore Bitcoin is solving (something like) BGP for the moment.

Analyzing the present based on available evidence is the only objective statement anyone can make on the matter.

Nonsense. There is no objective evidence in longest chain rule other than the longest chain. Period.

Quote from: smooth on February 09, 2016, 12:22:07 PM

Anyway, it turns out that monsterer is actually correct, and failures are observable in Bitcoin after all. You can't censor transactions without controlling either all the miners or creating forks. As long as neither condition is observed we know it hasn't failed.

Nonsense all. monsterer isn't correct.

Attacker only needs 51% of hashrate to censor transactions perpetually (and less % to delay transactions).

There is no (sustained) fork in the longest chain rule.