[swamp12]

(Jed from stellar here) The fork you are describing occurred in the previous protocol when all the nodes had the same UNL; the failure had everything to do with that previous protocol's response to overloading (it diverges based on timeouts, rather than getting stuck, and discards the losing fork on healing) and nothing to do with trust topology. So it didn't have anything to do with improperly set up trust.

In SCP the topology is public and conveyed with each consensus packet. So people will be able to tell when the graph is vulnerable.

Improving the definition of topology requirements for correct consensus is, far from being 'ignored', exactly what Mazieres has been working on all this time. And as you admit, those requirements have now been formalized and the information to check them is conveyed in the consensus packets; they are just not trivial to check by hand, and we have not yet implemented a check for them in stellar-core (this will be forthcoming, see roadmap).

[rfugger]

Hey Jed. I'd be interested in a post mortem on the fork, how the network broke down, and how the new protocol addresses those issues. Reading the paper, I can believe the new protocol works, but it's difficult for me to pinpoint how exactly it differs from the old protocol.

I'm also interested in how the explicit quorum slice data for each node can be used to maintain quorum intersection over the entire network as new nodes join.

[JoelKatz]

I'd be interested in a post mortem on the fork as well. During the split, either one side has a supermajority or neither side does. If one side has a supermajority, that side will win on rejoin, so no problem. If neither side has a supermajority, then one side or the other will win on rejoin, but nobody's been relying on either side. In every case, there should be no problem.