Re: Ripple/Stellar Consensus System May Have Serious Issues as Stellar Forks

The fork is a result of a long delay in a transaction block clearing, after which the consensus network decides it is not valid and ignores it when it finally does "unexpectedly" clear. The choice is between freezing the network to wait for the slow block to clear, or to decide to collectively move on. It's been a theoretical issue since inception but this is the first time it's actually happened IRL. The solution is to lengthen the clearing time in a situation like this, slowing the network but reducing the fork risk.


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  Original Message  
From: Manu Sporny
Sent: Saturday, 6 December 2014 23:06
To: Web Payments
Subject: Re: Ripple/Stellar Consensus System May Have Serious Issues as Stellar Forks

On 12/06/2014 05:20 PM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
> Interesting article here
> 
> http://www.coinsetter.com/bitcoin-news/2014/12/06/ripplestellar-consensus-system-may-serious-issues-stellar-forks-1969

This has some interesting info:

https://www.stellar.org/blog/safety_liveness_and_fault_tolerance_consensus_choice/

"""
This week, we discovered the first instance of a consensus failure. On
Tuesday night, the nodes on the network began to disagree and caused a
fork of the ledger. The majority of the network was on ledger chain A.
At some point, the network decided to switch to ledger chain B. This
caused the roll back of a few hours of transactions that had only been
recorded on chain A. We were able to replay most of these rolled back
transactions on chain B to minimize the impact. However, in cases where
an account had already sent a transaction on chain B the replay wasn’t
possible.
"""

I can't seem to find any documentation on the actual set of parameters
that would cause a ledger fork to happen. Anyone have a link to a
mathematical formula where it was proven/theorized that the event would
happen?

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: The Marathonic Dawn of Web Payments
http://manu.sporny.org/2014/dawn-of-web-payments/

Received on Saturday, 6 December 2014 23:38:42 UTC