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by EthanHeilman 2677 days ago
The CAP theorem [0] states that during a network partition a consensus system must either lose availability or consistency.

* Bitcoin loses consistency

* Algorand loses availability

I'm glad Algorand exists so that systems which value consistency over availability can be built.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem

1 comments

Usually, for distributed systems in adversarial settings we talk about safety and liveness. Bitcoin doesn't have safety, and both bitcoin and algorand seems to fail the liveness test as well.

In your terms, both bitcoin and algorand have weak availability.