Posts tagged #Byzantine generals
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The prisoners meet the generals
Getting strangers who do not trust each other to agree on a single truth, with no arbiter and over an unreliable channel: that is the Byzantine generals problem, the heart of distributed consensus. Classical solutions hold only among known, counted participants; Bitcoin solves it on an open network with proof-of-work, which makes lying expensive and turns the generals into a defused prisoner's dilemma. Out of it also comes a time chain: a chain with a direction, which fixes the order of events. The value lies there, in the problem solved.