Given an adversarial environment I don't believe you can maintain strong - decentralized - consistency AND have timely confirmation between arbitrary parties AND scale up to a large number of nodes/transactions.
Pick 2.
(fwiw I hope this is wrong, but I don't see how)
Pick 2.
(fwiw I hope this is wrong, but I don't see how)
Maybe some of those qualifications don't matter...maybe communication between parties are largely not arbitrary, maybe weaker models of consensus are practically viable...
But there is an inherent tradeoff when decentralizing, the more nodes/transactions the more processing/communication between nodes, the longer it takes for any party to be aware of global state.
Centralizing global state (in one or more parties) solves that scaling problem, but now you're not decentralized.
Maybe you don't need to be decentralized, maybe there are weaker models decentralization which still distribute trust in an acceptable way.
I'm skeptical of hierarchical systems though.
I'm skeptical of hierarchical systems though.
