Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: Decentralized Timestamp
by
telepatheic
on 21/05/2014, 09:25:15 UTC
So I was discussing this with a friend was wondering if you guys had any input, how would you go about creating a decentralized system that agrees on the current time?

Preferably not Proof of Work.

Thanks.

https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/time-clocks.pdf

Re-invent the wheel for your special protocol?


Hate to quote myself, but Lamport is able to establish a meaningful logical clock by the participants of the system interacting, I suppose this might be considered PoW, but does it have to be someone mining?  Would the time network fall apart if only one or two systems were a part of the network at some point in the future?

It only works if everyone in the system is honest. If you use the assumption that everyone is honest, you might as well just randomly pick a single node to tell everyone else what the time is.