[burke]

This is kind of explained away implicitly by pages 6-7. Each node has its own quorum slice, and they tend to point upward to a set of trustworthy financial institutions, not entirely unlike DNS.

i.e. FBA relies on a web of trust, not just on showing up and churning out hashes or whatever.

[TheOsiris]

isn't this still sort of pseudo-centralized? my guess is that most people will trust the same handful of nodes.

[JoelKatz]

This kind of "pseudo-centralized" is decentralized. When the "central authority" gets all of its power from individual participants who choose to follow it, and those participants are free to change the authorities at any time, that's a decentralized model. Bitcoin isn't centralized just because everyone has to agree on which transactions are valid.

[r721]

It's interesting how this suddenly shifts into "journalistic independence" territory - what about who reports on that? What if some influential source would receive some financial aid for proper reporting?