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Paxos and Raft are arguably the best known solutions to the Byzantine Generals problem not bitcoin. They provide stronger guarantees Bitcoin which allows forks.
by zaphar 11y ago
Paxos and Raft are arguably the best known solutions to the Byzantine Generals problem not bitcoin. They provide stronger guarantees Bitcoin which allows forks.
What Bitcoin provides that those algorithms do not specify is a cryptographically verified audit trail. However as some have mentioned here if you don't need the pseudonymity as these banks do not then you could add cryptographic auditing to one of those protocols. Bitcoin's proof of work is not a requirement in that case.
- DavidSJ 11y agoI think it would be more accurate to say that what Bitcoin provides that Paxos and Raft do not is trust-free consensus. The members of the Paxos parliament all trust that the others are properly following the protocol, but they still have to deal with all of the pathologies of an unreliable network. Bitcoin has to deal with unreliable networks and dishonest nodes who spend money multiple times. It handles that, at the cost of huge computational overhead.
- zaphar 11y agoActually since Paxos is meant to solve the byzantine generals problem they don't necessarily trust that the others are properly following the protocol. But the algorithm guarantees that as long as no more than N others are dishonest you can still reach consensus. Bitcoin does the same where N's value differs but with far more wasteful computation and less strong guarantees.
- DavidSJ 11y agoPerhaps you're thinking of Byzantine Paxos (not regular Paxos)? I'll have to read up on that to determine its relevance to the double-spend problem. One concern I'd have is how parliament membership is determined (e.g. what about Sybil attacks?).