Quote from: BTCtrader71 on January 29, 2015, 11:03:15 AM

The third step in my train of thought is that, if this management strategy is going to involve separating friendly nodes from enemy nodes, then to start out, the bitcoin network needs a way to label nodes. That was pretty much my entry point in the OP. I have tentatively suggested that nodes be tracked pseudonymously by labeling them using bitcoin public addresses. I know that this is a long thread and it is understandable if someone skimming may have assumed me to be proposing

To begin with there's no such thing as a good or bad node, or even what a bad miner is.

A consensus failure can not be "managed" by having miners present identification to any degree other than fully or not at all. By introducing any sort of identification you either need a third party (centralization), for nodes to be able to autonomously decide if an identification is real (impossible due to the Sybil problem) or have users each make their own decisions about who to trust (insane). For the latter everybody in the network must make the same decisions about who to trust, or else the chain fragments and consensus is lost anyway. There's only one trick that Bitcoin has for getting around the Sybil problem, and that's literally the whole system of proof of work to begin with.

Quote from: BTCtrader71 on January 29, 2015, 11:03:15 AM

Sybil attacks on decentralized distributed systems like bitcoin can be thought of as a disease. Some diseases are easily cured. Other disease, like diabetes, are not easily cured, but nevertheless need to be managed. Sybil attacks (of the type being discussed in this thread) belong to the camp of problems that have no known cure, but still need to be managed if and when they strike.

If there's some sort of majority or supermajority event we just need to accept the fact that the design has failed, there's no neat solution else we wouldn't have Bitcoin to begin with.

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