Quote from: cypherdoc on October 02, 2014, 04:21:08 PM

Quote from: thezerg on October 02, 2014, 03:31:22 PM

So in practice it solves 99.99% of the problem

by "it", do you mean the timeclock?

Yes. A semi-reliable time allows a bunch of entities to collectively decide that another entity is "dead". This makes non-Byzantine distributed consensus easy (by non-Byzantine, I mean it handles "normal" failures -- node death, network split -- but not pathological cases where a node is deliberately trying to break the election). This is all that is needed for distributed consensus in most tightly coupled distributed systems.

EDIT: I want to say one more thing about this which is about physics.

The BGP and Bitcoin's solution problem is fascinating because there are parallels with quantum mechanics which is also incapable of making a decision. Particles are modeled as probability fields until that is collapsed by observation. Block/txn validity is probabilistic and collapsed by work (building on the chain).

But another way to think of that collapse is simply that you have been incorporated into a specific case in the probability field but an outside observer is now unaware of your state (schrodinger's cat). From the outside observer's case, the probability field still exists; you are just now part of it.

So the universe only has state because it observes itself. Bitcoin is the same... it only has state (validated txns) in the eyes of observers within the system.