[Cryptography] Standards Trolls: Re: Bitcoin is a disaster.

[Ben Laurie]

On Tue, 5 Jan 2021 at 02:08, Greg <greg at kinostudios.com> wrote:

> See the DCS Theorem [1].
>

This uses an extremely weak version of "decentralised" (but it least has a
definition, which is far from the norm). That is:

"Decentralized means the system has no single point of failure or control
(SPoF). Another way to state this is: if any single element is removed from
{𝑆}, the system continues to perform its intended behavior, and no single
component in {𝑆} has the power to redefine 𝑓𝑆 on its own"


This is actually, in my view, a definition of a *distributed* system and is
not what I think people normally mean by "decentralised" (but it's hard to
tell because when I push on that particular point people generally stop
talking to me, or claim that it is "obvious" and I should stop wasting
their time). This is illustrated by a point made in the proof:

 "for a system to be considered decentralized, it must be uncompromised,
and that in turn means it successfully processes all authorized messages
from new users within some interval 𝑆𝑡 ."


This surely cannot hold for a truly decentralised system since such a
system can surely remain partitioned forever.
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