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Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think that’s correct. You can still have signed-but-contradictory messages, ie the double spend problem where the signatures are valid but promise the same money to two different people (or promise different attack strategies).

I think that statement would be correct if changed to “unforgeable messages with all same-side generals honest (and un-confused).

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In the Byzantine Generals Problem as stated in the paper, there is a single commander that decides on the plan. Paricipants known the identity of the commander in advance. In this case signatures are sufficient.

The problem you are describing is a different one, where there is no single commander and a group of generals needs to collectively decide on a plan. There signatures are indeed not sufficient. The way proof-of-work solves it is by randomly electing one of the generals to become commander for this decision round (i.e. 'it mines the block'). The random election is somewhat imperfect, leading to second order complexities such as probabilistic finality.

Ah, okay -- I was thrown off by the phrasing in your second paragraph, which was assuming the same things the paper did. To make the context explicit, one could phrase it like, "As soon as you have digital signatures and centralization, then you don't need blockchain." (Edit: which, correspondingly, debunks the numerous proposed uses of blockchain where they can assume centralization.)

Good point. I find that carefully phrasing the problem is half the solution. For example, the entire field of cryptography would not have moved beyond the one-time-pad if it wasn't for a rephrasing from 'impossible' to 'computationally infeasible'. Similarly with probabilistic algorithms.

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