Quote from: timeofmind on May 31, 2013, 11:41:35 PM

Quote from: Seth Otterstad on May 31, 2013, 10:42:09 PM

Quote from: timeofmind on May 31, 2013, 10:32:41 PM

Quote from: Seth Otterstad on May 31, 2013, 10:18:32 PM

This Quora answer describes the Byzantine General's problem well:

Quote

The Byzantine Generals' Problem roughly goes as follows: N Generals have their armies camped outside a city they want to invade. They know their numbers are strong enough that if at least 1/2 of them attack at the same time they'll be victorious. But if they don't coordinate the time of attack, they'll be spread too thin and all die. They also suspect that some of the Generals might be disloyal and send fake messages. Since they can only communicate by messenger, they have no means to verify the authenticity of a message. How can such a large group reach consensus on the time of attack without trust or a central authority, especially when faced with adversaries intent on confusing them?

http://www.quora.com/Bitcoin/Is-the-cryptocurrency-Bitcoin-a-good-idea

Obviously if you change the problem so that generals can trust certain other generals or messengers or outside "unique nodes", you can "solve" it. This is how banks and ripple solve it. Bitcoin's breakthrough was solving the problem with no trust by using a proof-of-work system. If a coin does not use POW, that means that there is centralization/trust involved. Emulah doesn't seem to understand this concept very well.

You did not even comment on the mechanism that Emulah claims to use above (ie. proof-of-work-of-verification). ie. Emulah attempts to rely on proof-of-work. The proof is just different from hashcash. ie. Emulah is using something different from hashcash to prove that work was done. Bitcoin and all other alts rely on the hashcash concept.

This amounts to executing messengers who are found to be fraudulent. A rouge general can still spawn an infinite number of messengers.

In bitcoin, every client must determine which blockchain required the most work to produce. The infinite messengers must do more work than the rest of the network to get its blockchain accepted. In the case of emula, the client must also decide on which transactions are the true ones, so there needs to be a way the client can determine which set of transactions required the most verification work to produce.

In Emula, there is no proof-of-work getting done by the generals, so all that can be verified is the existence of messengers and whatever random messages they want to make up. Emula seems to be taking the existence of a messenger as one vote, which is stupid.