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by xpe 1839 days ago
> The crypto currencies are a requirement to fulfill the Byzantine tolerance.

I find this writing to be unclear and/or circular.

Are you saying the following? _If_ the primary goal of a system is Byzantine fault tolerance, using a cryptocurrency is a requirement?

1 comments

Sorry, you have a point. I re-read my comment and it's not very clear. We need two things to achieve the Byzantine fault tolerance:

- a way to ensure that users of the system can't cheat by creating a vast number of nodes and inflate their "voting power" (think of a poll where you can get behind a proxy to vote multiple times because the only security is weather or not the IP voted): this is the hash-cash, proof of work computation that ensures you have real hardware behind your "vote"

- an incentive to mine and secure the network: the cryptocurrency. The amount of cryptocurrency you mined is just a translation of the energy and work you did to secure the network the same way as a banknote is a conversion of X number of hours you worked for someone.

The question, like I stated in another comment, is whether or not this distributed ledger is useful. Let's say we haven't discovered the killer use case for this yet (putting my skeptic hat). Is it fair to dismiss it just because of all the scams related to its current use ? Do we do the same for email just because there's so many phishing attacks that happen on the protocol ?