
Distributed consensus revised - kushti
https://blog.acolyer.org/2019/05/07/distributed-consensus-revised-part-i/
======
cube2222
If this interests you, check out their previous paper about generalised
consensus: [https://blog.acolyer.org/2019/03/08/a-generalised-
solution-t...](https://blog.acolyer.org/2019/03/08/a-generalised-solution-to-
distributed-consensus/)

I really like how understandable it is.

~~~
no_identd
Which itself represents a reply to
[https://hh360.user.srcf.net/blog/2019/02/towards-an-
intuitiv...](https://hh360.user.srcf.net/blog/2019/02/towards-an-intuitive-
high-performance-consensus-algorithm/)

------
r4um
Part 2 [https://blog.acolyer.org/2019/05/08/distributed-consensus-
re...](https://blog.acolyer.org/2019/05/08/distributed-consensus-revised-part-
ii/)

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pjkundert
The Avalanche protocol by Emin Gün Sirer appears to be a breakthrough in this
field, apparently even more general in nature than Hashgraph.

[https://youtu.be/AXrrqtFlGow](https://youtu.be/AXrrqtFlGow)

~~~
narnianal
If you "discover" something so simple, don't see people using it already, and
don't see most(!) people getting totally excited after learning to know about
it, then you know it's some kind of scam. It's not clear who is scammed and
how. Maybe the guy is scamming himself into believing he has a meaningful job.
Who knows. But you can now consciously decide if you want to participate in
any role (scammer, victim, police) of that game or simply move on with your
life.

~~~
dmuhs
Comments like these are the reason why the HN community becomes a bubble more
and more. New users just don't want to deal with this kind of hostility.

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no_identd
It'd almost certainly seem interesting to see whether one might manage to
crosspollinate the above paper with this 'recent' generalization result from
parameterized computational social choice theory:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.06030](https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.06030)

(Published version, closed access:
[https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3278739](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3278739))

Aziz, Haris; Lee, Barton E. – Sub-committee Approval Voting and Generalised
Justified Representation Axioms (2017/2018)

Abstract:

"Social choice is replete with various settings including single-winner
voting, multi-winner voting, probabilistic voting, multiple referenda, and
public decision making. We study a general model of social choice called sub-
committee voting (SCV) that simultaneously generalizes these settings. We then
focus on sub-committee voting with approvals and propose extensions of the
justified representation axioms that have been considered for proportional
representation in approval-based committee voting. We study the properties and
relations of these axioms. For each of the axioms, we analyze whether a
representative committee exists and also examine the complexity of computing
and verifying such a committee."

Citations:
[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=5804298394619698922](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=5804298394619698922)

And then, perhaps, _that theorem of infamity by that dude who might have gone
by—some name(, like, uh, )— 'Aumann'_

~~~
kjeetgill
I feel like a jerk reiterating this point from a cousin post but just a heads
up, but that's not really what this post is about. Maybe I'm being too literal
and I'm missing the connection you're drawing.

Consensus in voting systems is concerned with selecting either a single winner
or a ranked order from a set of candidates given the diverse preferences from
a pool of voters. It concerns the protocol by which they communicate their
preferences (vote favorite, pairwise, ranked preferences, etc.) and the
protocol by which they're combined to pick a winner (consensus) from the
population. The focus is on minimizing how objectionable the winning candidate
is over all voters.

Distributed consensus is more concerned with agreement of a proposition
between set of identical nodes (i.e. no preferences) that communicate by
sending messages over an asynchronous, lossy, reorderable, channels. The focus
here is about mitigating weakness of the communications channels and provide
stronger guarantees beyond that.

~~~
atoav
> The focus is on minimizing how objectionable the winning candidate is over
> all voters.

This is precisly the problem with electronic voting. It is not about creating
a process that is mathematically sound — it is about creating a process the
average voting helper can transparently follow, verify and trust in. Every
electronic system, no matter how transparent is always a black box to everbody
who didn’t either design it, or has both the skill and time to take it apart.

A mathematically sound result that average people can doubt, because it is a
blackbox to them, is useless for any meaningful vote.

