Don’t Roll Your Own Consensus

Rolling Your Own Consensus is clearly the blockchain version of Rolling Your Own Crypto.

Reasons for doing so that I have seen include,

• • I have a Better Way To Do Things (No. You don’t.)
• • It shouldn’t be hard, therefore it isn’t (Why? also, Yes, it is.)
• • What could possibly go wrong? (Yup)
• • We’re on AWS, so net-splits aren’t a thing (Oh yes they are)
• • Or outages (Ha. ha. ha. ha. ha)
• • Who cares what the academics think, this is the real world (Yikes)
• • We use redis for co-ordination (Sigh)
• • Actually, redis-cluster (Double sigh)

Next time you’re faced with one of these, I recommend running away. Immediately. With vigor.

Mind you, if you can’t run away, try asking some combination of

• 1) Is it proven?
• 2) Really?
• 3) With Math?
• 4) And peer-reviewed papers?

For extra credit, ask if they redid Paxos or Raft, without the un-necessary parts.And then, run away. Immediately. With vigor.