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The 1/3rd / 2/3rd pattern in a lot of blockchain BFT protocols is really elegant. If 1/3 of the voting power of a chain wants it to stop, then it probably shoul
by woah 7y ago
The 1/3rd / 2/3rd pattern in a lot of blockchain BFT protocols is really elegant. If 1/3 of the voting power of a chain wants it to stop, then it probably shouldn't be running. It takes 2/3rds of the voting power for the validators to actually steal anyone's money or alter history.
Your botnet example is a non-sequiter. Since power in BFT protocols does not stem from the wasting of electricity, botnets have nothing to do with any possible attacks on a BFT system.
- nybble41 7y agoOn the contrary, botnets are far more of a problem in systems designed to make it cheap to run a validator node. This creates an obvious opportunity for a Sybil attack: spawn a few thousand nodes on other people's insecure IoT devices and you immediately control far more than the requisite 1/3 or 2/3 of the network. It's a lot harder to control 51% of the hash rate for a PoW design like Bitcoin which effectively requires specialized hardware to mine competitively. I'm assuming they implement countermeasures against simply running a bunch of VMs or containers masquerading as a large number of independent nodes, for example by looking for multiple connections from the same IP addresses or subnet. Otherwise botnets would indeed be unnecessary to carry out the attack—anyone could do it from home with a modest PC.