Stellar revealed a flaw in Ripple/Stellar consensus. It seems there are still lots of room for better consensus.
https://www.stellar.org/blog/safety_liveness_and_fault_tolerance_consensus_choice/
https://www.stellar.org/blog/safety_liveness_and_fault_tolerance_consensus_choice/
Wow, another one bites the dust, and a big one!
Well, can't say this is a big shock, because when I've read their full paper I was surprised at how bad their system actually was - it made so many assumptions about the state of the network in order to function correctly.
Quote
We are still investigating the triggers for this consensus failure, but believe it is caused by the innate weaknesses of the Ripple/Stellar consensus system outlined above compounded by the number of accounts in the network. Presently, we have approximately 140,000 active accounts a week and over 3 million total accounts which is in excess of the approximately 120,000 total accounts (active and inactive) this stack has previously supported.
Our monitoring of the network has made it clear that the underlying Ripple/Stellar consensus system is not performing at this level of scale, which is still small relative to the global financial system. In order for such protocols to perform at real-world levels with the expected degree of safety, this number of accounts should not be a problem.
Our monitoring of the network has made it clear that the underlying Ripple/Stellar consensus system is not performing at this level of scale, which is still small relative to the global financial system. In order for such protocols to perform at real-world levels with the expected degree of safety, this number of accounts should not be a problem.
Just wow.
This also shows how difficult the distributed consensus is. Although I hope to do better, every such failure makes me suspect that I am deluded
(Sell, sell, sell! 
)Also, I can't fall back to Ripple's consensus now if Simcoin's consensus fails, at least not until they invent something better.
Well, let's hope it will work.