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What are the use cases of swarm consensus? Is it byzantine fault tolerant? (I think so?) If so, what component of the CAP theorem does it sacrifice? It it suita
by isaacimagine 5y ago
What are the use cases of swarm consensus? Is it byzantine fault tolerant? (I think so?) If so, what component of the CAP theorem does it sacrifice? It it suitable for use in federated/distributed contexts (e.g. resistant to Sybil attacks), or is it more a replacement for PAXOS or Raft?
I bring up the last point because these algorithms (e.g. Raft) require knowledge of the full quorum, whereas Swarm seems to work on a slice of the full quorum. If it is suitable for distributed use, how does it compare to constructions of FBA such as SCP?
- gritzko 5y agoVery good question. The article clearly lacks a section on that. This form of consensus is made for a different set of trade-offs than Raft or Paxos or blockchains. It implies a swarm of participants of an unknown size and, mainly, CRDT data structures. That subject deserves an article of its own though. Swarm consensus does not seek quorums, it has no knowledge of the number of nodes. It assumes there is a way to connect to the "giant cluster" in a highly redundant way. On the other hand, if disconnected (blackout etc), islands of consensus can progress despite that. So it is more on the AP side, like everything CRDT.
- colinmhayes 5y agoDoesn't seek quorums, so it's not consistent in the face of partitions.