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by wslh 2757 days ago
The problem is that having a non-BFT consensus is the same that using database nodes and if you use BFT consensus you don't have the performance required for most use cases. BFT-SMaRT supposely achieve 80k tps for a few nodes but when you scale to more nodes the performance degrades substantially.

Another issue against the DLT hype is that the blockchain does not provide security where 90% of the whole architecture is outside the blockchain, less if there are many few nodes.
1 comments
dlubarov 2757 days ago
There might be some constant factor penalty, but we can shard BFT systems much like we do with Paxos etc. See Shasper for example -- it won't have any practical limits on throughput.
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wslh 2757 days ago
Shasper[1] "Note: This is an experimental project. Everything will break, and it may disappear without any notice!" (sic).

Until we don't see a community working on adversarial attacks, we will not know if it is secure of not. There is concrete research about BFT since 1982.

[1] https://github.com/paritytech/shasper

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dlubarov 2757 days ago
Is your concern that the algorithms involved in schemes like Shasper might not be correct, or that their economic assumptions about attacks might fail?

I think it's very unlikely that any of the theoretical ideas behind Shasper are incorrect. Casper itself is simple and comes with a simple proof, and it's similar to an old algorithm by DLS [1], which also comes with a proof. Sharding does introduce some other machinery, like VDFs for randomness (specifically [2]), but that has been vetted by plenty of cryptographers such as Dan Boneh's group.

So even though there aren't any large-scale deployments of BFT algorithms yet, the approach is widely thought to be sound. I'm working on a blockchain based on sharded BFT, as is Ethereum, RapidChain, NEAR Protocol, and others.

It's always possible that our economic assumptions will fail, but they're not radically different from Bitcoin's. You can attack Bitcoin by buying 51% of all hash power, or you can attack a BFT system by buying 34% of all stake. Either way it comes down to making an assumption about the attacker's funding.

[1] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/tds/papers/Lynch/jacm88.pdf

[2] https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/623.pdf

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wslh 2756 days ago
> Casper itself is simple and comes with a simple proof

When I read the updates about Casper[1] there are plenty of issues presented, so don't sure why you are saying Casper itself is simple.

Fine you are working in the "Sigma Network", we are working with one of the projects mentioned there.

[1] https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/

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