Author Topic: A Rocket Scientist Looks at BitShares  (Read 4114 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline Riverhead

Decentralized Control.  The total decentralized population of the all owners participate in selecting the most reliable machines to run the network. Those 101 parts have no power over the owners. 101 dispersed redundant parts is a decentralization chauvinist red herring! That's not where control lies. Those 101 chosen nodes can be completely reconfigured by the fully decentralized participating owners in 10 seconds.

This.

A common question I get is, "if everyone is running on AWS or Digital Ocean won't they be targets to shutdown from regulators?"

The answer is as Stan says above. Having a configured delegate setup and ready to go on a laptop from your home can be turned on in seconds while searching for a new VPS. The powers that be may play wack-a-mole for a while and then give up.

Offline arhag

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 1214
    • View Profile
    • My posts on Steem
  • BitShares: arhag
  • GitHub: arhag
+5% Well said.

The other thing I would add is that even if the majority of these 101 highly-reliable, hand-picked parts simultaneously fail (e.g. collusion to double-sign blocks or selectively filter transactions), it does not lead to catastrophic failure. It only causes a network disruption as the owners and users of the system then need to rely on the less objective social consensus mechanisms to determine a correct fork via checkpoints / hard forks from which they can then proceed normally.

Offline Stan

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 2908
  • You need to think BIGGER, Pinky...
    • View Profile
    • Cryptonomex
  • BitShares: Stan
When the BitShares devs get a little uppity, I love to remind them that what they are doing is not exactly rocket science.   8)

But, while trying to find a way to communicate the architecture of BitShares to folks on other forums, I've stumbled on the following description, drawing on my past experience with continuously reconfiguring fault-tolerant flight control systems.  (Yes I wrote a technical report with that title back before there was an Internet or even a word processor.)  See if you buy this way of describing the BitShares architecture:

We tend to get three different attributes mixed up causing endless confusion even among men of good will.

Throughput Scalability and Fault Tolerance and Decentralized Control
are three different concepts. 

Fault Tolerance. We are saying 101 highly-reliable, tested and proven, hand-picked parts dispersed across the globe and selected by the entire owner population is sufficient redundancy to achieve reliable fault tolerance.  The only thing those parts can do is -- do their job to spec.  We can observe their performance and swap them out in ten seconds if they don't perform to spec. So, really, they are just interchangeable slave machines.  Producing the blocks is a mindless task.

Selecting which parts make up the machine is where the power lies.

Decentralized Control.  The total decentralized population of the all owners participate in selecting the most reliable machines to run the network. Those 101 parts have no power over the owners. 101 dispersed redundant parts is a decentralization red herring! That's not where control lies. Those 101 chosen nodes can be completely reconfigured or replaced by the fully decentralized participating owners in 10 seconds. 

We have decentralized p2p control
of a distributed, fault-tolerant computer
implementing an autonomous unmanned company
running a decentralized crypto currency exchange
which produces stable smart-coin products.

Throughput Scalability is also entirely different.  Any of the 101 nodes can scale up by adding parallel machines, side chains, and a thousand inventions we haven't dreamed of.   When we get to a billion owners and need a thousand machines per node, we can do that.  It will still be decentralized enough to ensure that the 101 (now bigger) parts that make up the distributed, fault-tolerant machine will perform their mindless slave jobs reliability - from positions scattered across 24 time zones.

Those million decentralized owners do not want to have to think about managing more than 101 redundant parts to their machine. 101 is plenty, maybe too many, for the average owner to keep track of how they are performing.  Adding more parts reduces the degree to which each part can be vetted and therefore reduces the system's reliability.   Total reliability is a combination of node redundancy and node reliability via reputation-based vetting.

In BitShares, absolute control is fully decentralized down to the votes of every single atomic BTS satoshi.  You can't get more decentralized than that.

« Last Edit: January 12, 2015, 04:47:51 am by Stan »
Anything said on these forums does not constitute an intent to create a legal obligation or contract of any kind.   These are merely my opinions which I reserve the right to change at any time.