10 ms·
> - Is Raft alone in this space, or are there other popular algorithms/libraries that fill the same space? to give an obvious answer, blockchains are one of th
by woojoo666 4y ago
> - Is Raft alone in this space, or are there other popular algorithms/libraries that fill the same space?
to give an obvious answer, blockchains are one of the methods used for trustless consensus (imagine how things could go wrong in RAFT's case if the leader was malicious)
- kjeetgill 4y agoWarning: you're going to get buried here. The 'right answer' is going to be Paxos and it's many flavors; a few references to Lamport, Google's Chubby, "Paxos Made Real". If the right people are on hn today you're going to get a few references ZAB (Zookeeper Atomic Broadcast) and View-Stampted Replication. Oh, and go watch all of Heidi Howard's talks. The problem spaces of byzantine and non-byzantine consensus are far enough apart ... well kinda like Atomicity in postgres and atomics is C++. You decide if that's a lot.
- School-Cotton 4y agoI’m the biggest cryptocurrency hater there is but even I admit that, despite being mostly useless in the real world for any purpose other than committing crimes, Bitcoin solved a class of consensus problem that hadn’t been solved before and is therefore a major academic achievement. My GP probably shouldn’t have been downvoted.
- kjeetgill 4y agoI agree completely! I always joke that the block and chain part of "blockchain" are boring: that's basically git! The cool part is byzantine consensus! But like I said, I also think that as a class of problems — byzantine consensus is just super different from the normal consensus problems paxos and raft are addressing. Way more than they might seem at first. Enough to be an off-topic to the point of just being naive or misleading.