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Comment by AtlasBarfed | Hacker News Reader

OH YEAH JEPSEN IS TEARING APART CRYPTO!!!!

Aphyr is the best. No matter your fave distributed tech and all it's CAP-don't-matter stuff, he shows that... CAP does very much matter and it's really hard.

Cassandra? Kafka? MongoDB (bwahahahah)? It's all got edge cases.

He should be getting paid a million bucks a year by various auditing/accounting firms and the FTC/SEC for validating crypto claims. It would be a massive public service.

I like that its being treated like a database, and that the safety/correctness of any blockchain has to be viewed from a distributed database standpoint.

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Jepsen is most certainly not "tearing apart crypto" nor is that even remotely the intention of this post.

From the very first paragraph:

>"This work was funded by Radix Tokens (Jersey) Limited, and conducted in collaboration with RDX Works Ltd ..."

The post also links to RDX Works Ltd's blog post on this collaboration. Also in the first paragraph.

That's the best part: they paid him to throw such savage shade on their blockchain. One transaction per second, one million transactions per second, what's the difference? It's just the roadmap, man.

Makes you wonder why they ended the collaboration in November and didn't continue to retain him to validate that the new stuff lives up to its claims, doesn't it?

It's not a secret at all. The response from the Radix CEO: "We re-used the part of his testing harness, and then re-created the other critical tests to determine if the errors detected where still present. He is fantastically expensive and booked 3-6 months in advance on average. We'll definite re-deploy this kind of testing again, but we'll save it for another bigger release, rather than a patch where the identified errors can be tested against."

I look forward to reading that report!

I wonder how much Aphyr charges for a Jespon audit

Yes, generally you pay third parties for their consulting services which is exactly what RDX Works did here. Are you familiar with the history of Jepsen tests? Because this report is a pretty standard analysis of his. I think if you read some of the other distributed systems analyses he has done this would be quite clear. Your take away that this was some sort of a "shade throwing" event is pretty bizarre.

I'm familiar with Jepsen. Most consultants may not be willing to lie, but they'll take care not to mention what you pay them not to mention. If this work was done by anyone else they'd probably say something like "performance was not evaluated because the contract only covers correctness", but no, Aphyr has to dissect the false marketing in detail. And Radix had the balls to hire him presumably knowing that this is what he does.

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