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It does not solve the Byzantine Generals problem... This has been apparent since Satoshi had to fly in to communicate from a place of authority how the protocol
by hudon 4y ago
It does not solve the Byzantine Generals problem... This has been apparent since Satoshi had to fly in to communicate from a place of authority how the protocol should be fixed to address bugs. This happened again after Satoshi's departure in 2013 [0] where the Byzantine Generals had to meet in a chatroom and be the "trusted central party" that the rest of the stakeholders followed. Without the leaders of the space being able to communicate directly on the Internet, Bitcoin would be a confused mess, since it's never clear when the longest chain should be abandoned given the ambiguous nature of bugs/features.
[0] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-bitcoin-fork-centralized-decision-making-saved-the-day/ https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-...
- z3c0 4y agoI don't consider forking to be a problem, though it very frequently gets treated like it's some silver bullet to the blockchain concept. Forking is the democratic nature of the system at work. A few key players in the system are not the only "Generals" - everybody acting as a verification node is a General, and which fork they choose to follow is still a decision that they hold. Bitcoin being young and having hiccups prompted people to listen to the "expert generals", but this isn't a function of blockchains, just society overall. Collectively choosing to abandon a long chain in favor of a short chain based on the opinions of experts is a great solution to the permanence of blockchains, which poses its own challenges. Before this incident, it was believed that a blockchain had to be 100% correct upon initialization, and any software developer should realize how much of a pipe-dream that is.