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 v...