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by recursive 1434 days ago
Sure, bitcoin "solves" byzantine generals the same way TCP "solves" it. The theoretical construction is probably unsolvable, like the halting problem. In practice, you can "solve" the halting problem for most inputs too.

In the general construction of byzantine generals, there's essentially an adversarial agent preventing arbitrary communications. As far as I know, a distributed ledger can't generally survive in such an environment. Nor can TCP.