Protocol for Asynchronous, Reliable, Secure and Efficient Consensus [pdf]

Blockchains have been getting the lions share of attention for several years. PARSEC enabled networks, SAFE (MAIDSAFE) in particular, could change that. Blockchains have been battling energy usage, centralization and speed for awhile. Non-blockchain consensus should really open a lot of doors to allow decentralized, trustless, non-censorable solutions.<p>It will be interesting to see what other networks besides SAFE adopt this consensus mechanism.

Without proof-of-work, what protects consenus from the sybil attack?<p>As I understood, after quick scan of the paper, consensus is achieved by simple majority vote.<p>So if I setup 10,000 docker containers running malicious nodes, I could take over the network and forge any blocks I want.<p>What I am missing?

Nice! I found Hashgraph very interesting, but their patent stance made it a no-go for any serious DLT project. Glad that there is now a similar project without the attached patent! Let&#x27;s just hope that it&#x27;s not so similar that it falls under the original one.<p>Still need to dig deeper into it, and would love to hear other peoples&#x27; evaluations, but at a first glance, PARSEC could actually be a serious player in the DLT game.

A good point from the forum. “Now PARSEC won’t be used in SAFE to let the entire network communicate and come into global consensus like for example Bitcoin does, instead PARSEC will be used by many small sections of the network to reach “local” consensus for the corresponding section of the network. The obvious attack vector here is to join one section with many nodes of your own to hijack that particular section. The idea is to make this attack infeasible by having the network occasionally relocate nodes (when they age&#x2F;rank up), so an attacker doesn’t have control over in what sections of the network its nodes are located. If this idea works as well in practice as it does in theory, attacking a section is about as hard as attacking the entire network (all the sections).”<p>So proof-of-work is inherently resistant to sybil attacks while PARSEC on its own isn’t, so to tell the story properly the random but deterministic relocating of nodes needs to be included.

I always felt that blockchain is a precursor technology like &quot;Web 2.0&quot;, which laid the technical foundations (of Web APIs and micro-services) that enabled the explosion of mobile apps that followed.<p>If smarter people than me can mathematically verify the PARSEC algorithm as valid, it may lead the way for a radical change to the way information is propagated, secured and validated.

No noises from the big names in crypto yet. I guess many are carefully going through it and preparing their questions and concerns. Peer-review can&#x27;t come quickly enough. I can&#x27;t wait to see how the world responds to this. Have MaidSafe really managed to pull this off?! I mean, WOW, if they have! Fingers crossed.

Interesting to see PARSEC mentioned in this topical piece. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.bitcoin.com&#x2F;proof-of-work-coins-on-high-alert-following-spate-of-51-attacks&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.bitcoin.com&#x2F;proof-of-work-coins-on-high-alert-f...</a>

Medium article that goes with the release: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;safenetwork&#x2F;parsec-a-paradigm-shift-for-asynchronous-and-permissionless-consensus-e312d721f9d8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;safenetwork&#x2F;parsec-a-paradigm-shift-for-a...</a>

Refreshing to see a maidsafe submission here on HN.