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by jancsika 3373 days ago
> Each half would append their own blocks to the blockchain happily, and depending on the chain lengths added, once the partition went away there would be no good way to reconcile.

Why do you say that? The chain with the greatest total difficulty wins.

3 comments

Which means that all the people who wrote to successfully and relied on the other chain over the last week suddenly lose all their transactions. That's not what anyone means by CP.
That is not an acceptable form of reconciliation in a CP system.
Bitcoin is AP not CP.
The hard problem is consistency, in terms of tradeoffs and implementation. Pure AP is easy.
What if both happen to have the same total difficulty? Granted, it is unlikely, but so is unlikely a failure of non-paxos system with lease timeouts on the order of ~10 minutes.