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Comment by mirekrusin | Hacker News Reader

"... gives maximum freedom ..." nice way of putting the fact that there's basically no consensus; i've got even better idea, with more freedom - everybody can write whatever they want into append only database and they have freedom to choose which bits make sense.

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That sounds like secure scuttlebutt.

Secure Scuttlebutt is a database protocol for unforgeable append-only message feeds.

"Unforgeable" means that only the owner of a feed can update that feed, as enforced by digital signing (see Security properties). This property makes Secure Scuttlebutt useful for peer-to-peer applications. Secure Scuttlebutt also makes it easy to encrypt messages.

https://scuttlebot.io/more/protocols/secure-scuttlebutt.html

This is a very lucid description of how Secure Scuttlebutt works.

SSB is deliberately “against consensus”, which makes it useless as a trustless decision-making tool. So I take your point that this property of Stellar seems to make Stellar useless for its stated purpose. (I haven't read the paper, so I may be very wrong.)

Multiple commenters here are saying that Stellar has no consensus. Is that true? How could such a big issue be overlooked?

> Is that true?

No.

If you’re worried about it, read the linked paper. The mechanics (and assumptions) are covered in painstaking detail.

So, IOTA?

IOTA is not decentralized. Although it allegedly will be in the future.

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