Quote from: drays on Today at 03:48:26 PM

Let me understand this right... If somebody (hackers, government or anything of that sort) takes down all 12 Order Providers, and keep them down (harass the owners, arrest them or whatever), what will happen to the network? Can transactions still be made, and will they be secure and trusted, without possibility of double-spend, fork or any other manipulation?

If those 12 Order Providers never come back, can/will other entities take their role and become Order Providers, how that process will be conducted (can it be decentralized?), and how much time will it take?

I am just trying to understand, I like the project, its uniqueness, I was here back when it was just started, but didn't follow since... and whether Obye meets my perception of decentralization... thanks for everyone's input.

P.S. An unrelated question... Is tonych still actively working on this project?

If somebody manages to take down majority of Order Providers (7 out of 12) then network will still work (accepts payments and relays it to other full nodes), but the new part of the DAG doesn't become stable (transactions in new part of the DAG doesn't become confirmed/final). That's because Order Providers are not middlemen like block producers, Order Providers are more like lighthouses that others follow and they do exactly the same things as other full nodes that post transactions, they just have pledged to do it with a version of a full node (obyte-witness) that posts those transactions regularly. There can be many other full nodes on the network, some of them have to be full nodes, some of them don't https://developer.obyte.org/tutorials-for-newcomers

While the Order Providers are down, you can still post new transaction even with unconfirmed UTXOs - this feature has been there since early 2019 for your own UTXOs and has been optional for incoming uncomfirmed transactions (Spend unconfirmed funds setting), but with the latest GUI wallet, it's ON for all transactions. On blockchains, there is no order for transactions before block producers/miners take them from mempool and add to new block, but on Obyte, even when Order Providers are down, you can broadcast your transactions to the network and they have some kind of order already, just not final. You could argue that, the fee sets the order, but that's only true once the block is actually mined and block producers/miners can re-order the block contents anyway they like. It has become even a rapidly exploitable thing called MEV (BPEV). This makes blockchain unsuitable for DeFi.

Yes, you can ATTEMPT a double-spend any time, but if it clearly comes later than previous spending then it gets discarded immediately and if the order cannot be clearly calculated yet because not enough transactions from Order Providers then both transactions remain in the unstable part of the DAG until the order can be figured out by all full nodes. Full nodes need Order Provider transactions to figure out the main path (main chain) through the DAG. Order Providers doesn't vote on any transactions, they just show the direction of the DAG and therefore a main chain, like dropping breadcrumbs for others to follow.

If those majority of the Order Providers (7 out of 12) never come online then the community has a decision to make, either wait little longer or hard-fork and put new Order Providers in place (hard-fork needed because normally only 1 Order Provider can be changed at once, not multiple at once).

Yet, the age old question remains, which I have asked from FUDsters before: where is it illegal to post transactions to distributed ledger and how would 7 government institutions suddenly agree and get court orders to organize a event of taking down all the Order Provider nodes? Order Providers doesn't vote on any transactions and if posting to distributed ledger becomes illegal then making new blocks or voting whose transactions go to blocks would become illegal way before.

Already today, we see some miners attempting to not include transactions from some addresses, it's just not an issue yet when majority doesn't do the same. On Obyte, Order Providers have no choice to tell what gets into the DAG and what doesn't - majority of them would need to sabotage the whole network in order to censor one. On blockchain, it takes majority to censor one, but you can't fork away from tyrannic mining whale, they will follow you even when you hard-fork, unless you change the mining algorithm so much that their miners become absolute.

P.S. Yes, you can see his post history that he posts updates here sometimes, but mostly you can see him on Discord. His next post will probably be either about Obyte-Ethereum/BSC bridge or about Smart Contracts with Arbitration. Both built by multiple devs.