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immibis 4 days ago

Sure you can, if you can resynchronize the time whenever partitions reconnect.

Some clock drift might even be ignorable. I say it's 5:00 and I have 100 tokens, you say it's 4:55 and I only have 99. Doesn't matter, I'm only spending 5 tokens anyway.

__MatrixMan__ 4 days ago | parent [-]

But how do you decide, when they come back together, which side was right?

I'll confess to sort of making this up as I go along, so I don't have any sources to cite here, but when I sit down and think about it I come to the conclusion that partition tolerance means that when you come across a disagreement of this kind, you can't just let the more powerful partition win (We already have that, both in banking and in blockchains. Snore.)

Consensus has to come from the circumstances of the transaction. What's the intersection of the people I trust with the people you trust? Are there transitive trust pathways between us? Calculate the consensus value based on those pathways. It comes not from whether one of us is backed by a bigger bully, but rather because we've both personally chosen to trust the people that we have, and we've provided incentives for them to continue to be trustworthy.