Re: The Ethereum Paradox

Quote from: TPTB_need_war on February 16, 2016, 11:13:12 AM

You are referring to asset exchange (not Ethereum's scripting). As you have stated, only the consensus mechanism can choose between the plurality of partial orderings because the partial orderings are arbitrary (and in the presence of competing double-spends, the partial orderings are conflicting). Thus Nash equilibrium depends on the consensus mechanism not being gameable which is the point I was making in my Edit#2 of my prior post.

I am interpreting your posts as you continue wishing for some sort of absolute, structural synchrony which can't exist in distributed systems. Did I misunderstand your question?

This is more a theoretical question about the overall solvability of the problem with scripting, dependencies and ordering. All inputs to a script come via a transaction, so, I am asking if there were a set of dependencies specifiable in any given transaction that forced the referenced transactions* to be ordered before the new transaction, is this enough for the system to decide on an overall order?

*) To address your other point, specifically in ethereum, dependencies would have to be specified as references to previous blocks, not previous transactions because, as you point out, there is only a partial order in a blockchain. The system would then have to group transactions with compatible dependencies into blocks.

In addition, yes, I am hoping an eventual total ordering of transactions is possible.