A Guide to 99% Fault Tolerant Consensus

1 · · Aug. 8, 2018, 1:03 a.m.
Special thanks to Emin Gun Sirer for review We’ve heard for a long time that it’s possible to achieve consensus with 50% fault tolerance in a synchronous network where messages broadcasted by any honest node are guaranteed to be received by all other honest nodes within some known time period (if an attacker has more than 50%, they can perform a “51% attack”, and there’s an analogue of this for any algorithm of this type). We’ve also heard for a long time that if you want to relax the synchrony ...