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by jude-
3573 days ago
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No. First, solutions to Byzantine agreement for known numbers of processes predate Bitcoin. Second, Nakamoto Consensus is not Byzantine agreement. Byzantine agreement forbids committed writes from being reverted, and each replica sees the same history of writes. However, Nakamoto Consensus only offers probabilistic write durability (our transactions can get orphaned arbitrarily far into the future), and different peers can see divergent histories of arbitrary length even under normal operation. Third, Byzantine agreement is defined in terms of the set of peers. Systems where the agreement protocol does not know the number of peers cannot solve the Byzantine agreement problem, since they can't prove that no more than f of 3f+1 peers are faulty (neither quantity is known to the system). Fourth, open-membership Byzantine agreement was published this year: http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/08/04/byzcoin/. The membership set changes every "block", but the peers in the set during the current epoch are known. EDIT: typo |
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Mining is a function of turning electricity into coins. Since coin generation rate is fixed through a difficulty adjustment, mining becomes a winner-take-all game where only those miners with the lowest electricity costs can effectively compete. Thus the system collapses quickly into a mining oligarchy.
What does Byzcoin propose to resolve the as-yet unresolved problem of mining centralization, which is fundamental to the success of any of these coins?