[Cryptography] new, more efficient consensus protocol

[Dennis E. Hamilton]

jrzx at protonmail.ch <mailto:jrzx at protonmail.ch>  posted
Sent: Thursday, January 14, 2021 22:03
To: Cryptography Mailing List <cryptography at metzdowd.com>
Subject: [Cryptography] new, more efficient consensus protocol
 
Solving the problem of distributed consensus is hard.
 
[orcmid] [ … ]
 
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.
 
[orcmid] I have been following this discussion and notice that nowhere does Algorand come up.  There is a claim that the blockchain trilemma is solved via the Algorand methodology.
 
The proof-of-stake is done in a way that provides secure ledgers without the scalability problems, via a Pure Proof-of-Stake.  This white paper is pretty puffy, although it does get down to the trilemma and the claim that Algorand overcomes it: < https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/algorands-core-technology-in-a-nutshell>
 
Micali has presented a technical webcast that gets into how Byzantine Agreement is handled such that the approvers of a block are selected and the reliance of a cryptographically random procedure for becoming a member of the party that approves or disapproves of a given new block.
 
It is discouraging that there is a lot of Patent Pending in this.  It strikes me as important to understand regardless.
 
*	Dennis
 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/attachments/20210115/676fa893/attachment.htm>