Bitcoin did two things to this paper, first it demonstrates that Byzantine fault tolerance has practical applications, and second it demonstrates that anytime you have to deal with Byzantine fault tolerance the question is not "How do I verify this message?" but "Why am I trying to deal with those assholes?"
"Listen, regardless of which Byzantine fault tolerance protocol you pick, Twitter will still have fewer
than two nines of availability. As it turns out, Ted the Poorly
Paid Datacenter Operator will not send 15 cryptographically
signed messages before he accidentally spills coffee on the air
conditioning unit."
This is one of my favorite quotes from technical comedic writing
> “How can you make a reliable computer service?” the presenter will ask in an innocent voice before continuing, “It may be difficult if you can’t trust anything
and the entire concept of happiness is a lie designed by unseen overlords of
endless deceptive power.”
If you didn't know Mickens[0] and you enjoyed this piece, you may want to peruse more of the same[1]. They're not all this good, but they are good.
Your theories on Muppet physiology are childish and naïve, and I viciously refute them in my upcoming article “Parasitic Infections of Muppet Gastrointestinal Hand Holes.”
This is why I no longer work on trustless systems.
In actually useful business problems, there is trust to be "exploited" to make the system simpler than Byzantine algorithms can manage. And what if the trust is exploited for theft? Then the parties take a loss, learn who can't be trusted, and get on with business.
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