[Cryptography] Proposal of a fair contract signing protocol

[Christian Huitema]

On Tuesday, June 14, 2016 12:04 AM, Ron Garret wrote:
>
> 
> You are assuming the communications channel between Alice and Bob is
> reliable.  If it’s not, then the participants cannot reach a reliable conclusion
> about whether or not they have actually reached an agreement.  In the real
> world this rarely matters because modern communications channels are
> reliable and for most negotiations the stakes are low.  But you and I actually
> experienced a real-world failure of exactly this sort recently where the result
> was that I showed up for a meeting and you didn’t (twice!).  And this
> happened because during a critical period we did not have a reliable
> communications channel.  So this sort of thing really does matter even in the
> real world on occasion.

How is this negotiation different from the Two Generals' Problem? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals%27_Problem).

-- Christian Huitema