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Bitcoin "solves" the problems behind Byzantine fault tolerance, quorum systems, etc by completely ignoring the past 30 years of research on the topic, and intro

Bitcoin "solves" the problems behind Byzantine fault tolerance, quorum systems, etc by completely ignoring the past 30 years of research on the topic, and introducing a very simple construction that bypasses all of the issues entirely by using the concept of proof of work. Don't get me wrong, Bitcoin is a brilliant idea, but it's the sort of brilliant idea which is actually more likely to come to you if you were NOT bogged down by existing research on how to do things. Satoshi's primary gift was not deep knowledge, it was a fresh perspective. And I am not saying these things because Ethereum is a super-magic-brilliant protocol that involves deep knowledge about thirty years of development in multiple fields; it's not. It's also an ultimately fairly elementary idea that I still remain surprised that nobody tried to seriously push before me. In fact, at least two other groups got very close in 2012-2013, and a few weeks ago at the payments innovation conference in Boston I learned that apparently the concept sans blockchain was around in the 1990s; but for some reason they did not take the idea to its logical conclusion. Also, our implementation of GHOST does not in any way compromise the concept of global state; blocks are required to specifically include uncle headers in order to benefit from them.

bachback 13y ago
I would suggest to run a simulation where nodes are globally distributed and have various latencies with high variance, and then study this problem of non-uniform distribution of information. with GHOST nodes would cluster in physical locations (say Iceland). the latency between those heavy nodes would be very low, and the latency to say Australia very high. the heavy nodes could then co-opt the network. it does not help if the authors proves a bound of latency, because this imbalance would destroy the network. with geographically skewed distribution of information, one can imagine all kinds of weirds effects and attacks. perhaps I'm wrong and will find out this actually works, but even then robustness requires safety over the longterm in very unexpected cases.
- vbuterin 13y ago
  The information distribution should not be any more skewed than Bitcoin because every block can be validated by itself assuming only the validity of its parent as prior knowledge. This differs from the Israeli authors' GHOST, which assumes that nodes already have the uncles; in our system, uncles are included in the block. But we are definitely going to be doing various kinds of network simulations to make sure that every network protocol we push out is stable and convergent.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]

bachback 13y ago

I would suggest to run a simulation where nodes are globally distributed and have various latencies with high variance, and then study this problem of non-uniform distribution of information. with GHOST nodes would cluster in physical locations (say Iceland). the latency between those heavy nodes would be very low, and the latency to say Australia very high. the heavy nodes could then co-opt the network. it does not help if the authors proves a bound of latency, because this imbalance would destroy the network. with geographically skewed distribution of information, one can imagine all kinds of weirds effects and attacks. perhaps I'm wrong and will find out this actually works, but even then robustness requires safety over the longterm in very unexpected cases.

vbuterin 13y ago
The information distribution should not be any more skewed than Bitcoin because every block can be validated by itself assuming only the validity of its parent as prior knowledge. This differs from the Israeli authors' GHOST, which assumes that nodes already have the uncles; in our system, uncles are included in the block. But we are definitely going to be doing various kinds of network simulations to make sure that every network protocol we push out is stable and convergent.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]