Don’t Roll Your Own Consensus

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.

(This article also appears on my blog)