[rocqua]

A very quick look at ripple leads to my following interpretation.

"ripple is voting with a consensus level of 80%, so it can tolerate byzantine failure of 20% of all nodes". My question is then, how does this deal with sibyl attacks. That is, how does it prevent me from just creating a large amount of participants. Similarly, what happens when nodes 'leave' the system.

Say we have 200 nodes, then the consensus level is 160 nodes. What happens when 10 nodes stop responding? Are we forever stuck with the consensus level of 160 or does it ever drop to 152 nodes? In the first case, we are inevitably careening towards faulty nodes forming 20% of all required votes. In the second, we can enforce consensus by censoring other nodes.