Don’t Roll Your Own Consensus
1 min readMar 25, 2019
Rolling Your Own Consensus is clearly the blockchain version of Rolling Your Own Crypto.
Reasons for doing so that I have seen include,
- I have a Better Way To Do Things (No. You don’t.)
- It shouldn’t be hard, therefore it isn’t (Why? also, Yes, it is.)
- What could possibly go wrong? (Yup)
- We’re on AWS, so net-splits aren’t a thing (Oh yes they are)
- Or outages (Ha. ha. ha. ha. ha)
- Who cares what the academics think, this is the real world (Yikes)
- We use redis for co-ordination (Sigh)
- Actually, redis-cluster (Double sigh)
Next time you’re faced with one of these, I recommend running away. Immediately. With vigor.
Mind you, if you can’t run away, try asking some combination of
- Is it proven?
- Really?
- With Math?
- And peer-reviewed papers?
For extra credit, ask if they redid Paxos / Raft, without the un-necessary parts.
And then, run away. Immediately. With vigor.