[Cryptography] new, more efficient consensus protocol

[jrzx]

Solving the problem of distributed consensus is hard.

Hardly anyone understands Paxos. All solutions to distributed consensus turn out to be equivalent to Paxos, albeit usually broken forms of Paxos, and the equivalence is often unobvious.

But Paxos assumes everyone follows the process.

Trouble is, someone who does not follow process (Byzantine fault) gets a large advantage in getting his way - and pretty soon no one is following process, whereupon you cannot get consensus any more.

Byzantine Fault Tolerant Distributed Consensus is very hard.

If you don't understand how hard it is, and why it is so hard, you should not be coming up with bright ideas to solve it.

States die from their elite not following process. It is a big problem, and the solutions are right at the edge of comprehension.

Proof of work was a brilliant and unobvious solution - but it is costing too much, and it is slowing down the rate at which transactions can handled, which slowness is now starting to bite hard.

The blockdag, done right, is equivalent the Practical Fault Tolerant Byzantine consensus, albeit the equivalence is far from obvious, and the blockdag is in ways simpler to understand. Practical Fault Tolerant Byzantine consensus is arcane, but reveals a number of interesting mathematical facts about the nature of collective action.
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