Byzantine has I think been misused. It’s the least number of good members you need to be successful, not the best number. I think there’s a reason parliamentary systems have a supermajority rule for making certain kinds of changes and a simple majority for others and we should probably be doing the same when we model systems.

It is simple enough for an adversarial system to subvert some members via collusion and others via obstruction. Take something like Consul which can elect new members and remove old ones (often necessary in modern cloud architectures). What does 50.1% mean when the divisor can be changed?

And meshes are extremely weird because the whole point is to connect nodes that cannot mutually see each other. It is quite difficult to know for sure if you’re hallucinating the existence of a node two hops away from yourself. You’ve never seen each other, except maybe when the weather was just right one day months ago.