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Comment by rawgabbit | Hacker News Reader

For distributed systems, the main idea is a centralized write ordering journal that is replayed by individual nodes.

Multiple systems write sequentially to the central journal. The journal is simply taking requests like a key value store. The journal is replicated to all the nodes. The nodes read from the journal and performs the complex logic requested.

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If business software practices is not enough of a proof, look at any massive online games. They all use one central server as a source of truth about the game world, and broadcast that state to the clients. Anything a client reports that diverges from the central server view is either corrected, rejected, or becomes a reason to disconnect the client for cheating attempts.

If you need strict order, that order should happen in strictly one place. (The universe itself does not support strict order at a distance, as Special Relativity shows.)

Bitcoin: Am I joke to you?

Everyone: yes.

Bitcoin is an interesting exception to the above. Issue is latency.

Latency might be OK. The true price of trustless consensus is proof of work, that is, energy.

> Latency might be okay.

Nope. Not for real-time gaming which is the topic at hand. Certainly not at scale. Certainly not at the kind of volume of events that gaming produces.

There's no performance gain from bitcoin's approach though. The distributed consensus is there for trustless operation, not performance. It's many orders of magnitude slower (and a few more orders of magnitude more power inefficient!) than just having one server handle it.

Isn't bitcoin actually eventual consensus determined by increasing unlikelihood of finding a conflicting sequence of hashes?

Yes, although if the consistency is good enough for _payments infrastructure_, it's probably good enough for just about everything.

If a particualr mechanic part is good enough for a _space ship_, it's probably good enough for just about everything.

But its price may be prohibitive.

that is server/many clients, not distributed

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