"...a Byzantine quorum system with 20 nodes would be more decentralized than Bitcoin or Ethereum with significantly fewer resource costs. Of course, the design

"...a Byzantine quorum system with 20 nodes would be more decentralized than Bitcoin or Ethereum with significantly fewer resource costs. Of course, the design of a quorum protocol that provides open participation, while fairly selecting 20 nodes to sequence transactions, is non-trivial." That's exactly what the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP) is: https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pdf https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pd... (Full disclosure: I work at Stellar)