

Could you pls expand on this: "Bitcoin solves also a latency variance problem, to achieve logical broadcast"?

how does one node know what other nodes are doing if latency between the messages could be anything between 50ms and 5000ms? if one node has a good position in the network it would know more than other nodes and outpace the network. which is exactly what would happen with ghost. the ghost authors have bound estimations on latencies, overlooking the possibility of information arbitarge. somebody would figure out where the most information comes from and arbitrage the network. so besides hashing attacks there are "latency attacks", but they don't even appear in Bitcoin, because blocks solve that issue. latency is negligible vs. the 10-minute block time. this could be shown with a timing attack on an alt-coin with < 60 sec blocktime.

Lamport's work make this connection obvious. He invented the Byzantine Generals Problem and wrote this paper: "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System", Communications of the ACM 21, July 1978 http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/t...

logical broadcast means: every node has the same state (time invariance). the only thing that matters is hashing power.

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