Tesla Coils and Corpses, 2014-08-01 — Ripple/Stellar/etc.

[Zooko Wilcox-OHearn]

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LAFS Tesla Coils & Corpses, 2014-08-08
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in attendance: Taylor, Zooko (scribe), Nathan

Ripple consensus mechanism: ??? Zooko has heard second-hand that there
has never been documentation of the consensus mechanism. Zooko assumes
that it is effectively a simple federated-centralized mechanism, where
there are a small number of special organizations, and everyone relies
on that set of organizations for double-spend-protection. So it isn't
really "decentralized" in the Bitcoin sense. (But it isn't a bad
architecture, in Zooko's opinion! (Zooko got most of his opinions
about Ripple from Andrew Miller.))

Nathan wants to back off from Bitcoin-style distributed consensus and
consider whether there are other paths through the design space. So
here's a nice narrowly-scoped section of the design space: there is a
cryptoledger system in which people control private keys and can sign
over some of their assets to other public keys, and there's only one
ledger server. And we assume that it is partially corrupt in that
would engage in rollback/replay/double-spend attack if it were
profitable. Now, can we make it unprofitable?

Nathan was frustrated with Ripple.com. There's a note that says "It
will be open-sourced soon.". Nathan can't find actual protocol docs,
etc. etc.

Zooko says "I have a suggestion for you: stop looking at ripple.com;
look at stellar.org.". Nathan looked at stellar.org and saw a github
link at the top of the front page. He felt better. Then he found an
actual API doc, and felt much better.

I think there might have been a lot more discussion in this session,
but I stopped taking notes and a week later when I looked back at it,
I couldn't remember. Sorry!