The Saddest Moment (2013) [pdf]

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."

Hey man, leave Keanu out of this

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.

[0] which I discovered through HN years ago, thanks folks [1] https://danielcompton.net/james-mickens-collection

I don't actually care about byzantine fault tolerance. But, James Mickens wrote it? I'm reading.

Mickens is the best!

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.

Humans trust. Their systems should too.

Things would be profoundly simpler if Judge Dredd would take care of computer crackers.