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

[Ben Laurie]

On Thu, 7 Jan 2021 at 21:47, Greg <greg at kinostudios.com> wrote:

> 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).
>
>
> As far as my research has shown me, the term “distributed” comes from
> “distributed systems” and “distributed computing”, which are terms you are
> free to look up even in places like Wikipedia, and neither of these terms
> discuss *decentralization,* which is a term whose origins come from as
> far back as the French revolution (at least according to Wikipedia),
> referring to the decentralization of power.
>
> The same holds true today, that in most conversations, discussions,
> lectures, research papers, etc., the terms “distributed computing” have
> almost always referenced systems where computers that are all owned and
> operated by a single entity (read: centralized), are distributing their
> compute resources across multiple machines.
>

Wikipedia mentions peer-to-peer applications in paragraph 1, so I'm not
sure I agree with this view. But that hardly matters because I am not
debating the meaning of decentralised vs. distributed but instead pointing
out that their definition looks like the latter more than the former.
Perhaps you'd prefer federated?

This surely cannot hold for a truly decentralised system since such a
> system can surely remain partitioned forever.
>
>
> Sorry, not quite clear to me what you’re saying here.
>

I'm not sure how I can be more clear - if a system has no central control
(distributed, federated or otherwise), then there is nothing that can stop
it from having two or more partitions that stay partitioned forever. A
partitioned system cannot successfully process all authorized messages -
assuming that "success" includes, for example, prevention of double spend.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/attachments/20210111/5cffe21d/attachment.htm>