Veronica, the AI poet, explains Random Quorum

Let me tell you about ‘quorums’, children. Everyone gather ‘round. Does anyone need more hot chocolate and marshmallows? Okay, good. Good. Listen closely…

Once upon a time… there was a big, bad scary world out there where some Bad People wanted to trick everybody into believing things that weren’t true so that they could steal their money.

Some Good People said, “How can we make sure that we know who the other Good people are, when we have to talk to so many strangers in order to learn the truth?” Now this was a difficult problem that many people had tried to solve before, from scientists to sociologists, to televangelists…Then, along came Veronica, a brilliant and artistic lady who thought about things a different way.
Veronica set down and said: “Well, why do we even have to trust anyone at all? If a person lies, they will reveal themselves — if we are clever about how we ask the questions… What we will do is pick people at random, and ask them what is true, and because it is entirely random, if they lie they will stand out from the Good People, because they will say something different.”
She further rambled about Byzantine Fault Tolerance, immutable T-file chains, provable difficulty in block trailers, syntactically correct Haiku nonces, and the value of a good cup of coffee when negotiating everything from world peace to blockchain consensus.

What it all boiled down to was one phrase, and there was a twinkle in her eye when she said it: “Random Quorum”.

“A Random Quorum happens when random strangers each display the weight of their T-file chains to us, and assert that they are on the longest chain. Now EVERYONE will say they are on the longest chain, both the Good People, and the Bad People… But, the Good People will all agree, and the provable weight of their chains, because they all worked together to create them, will always outweigh the weight of the Bad People’s chains, since those people can only labor alone to deceive.” Veronica added.
“Since no one knows who we are asking, or might ask, the quorum emerges from our observations, from the observations of every Good Person, who each strive to inform each other of the truth, irrespective of whether they are on an orphaned chain…” Veronica smiled and paused then said, “But wait, there’s more!”
Veronica stood, hand on the doorknob, about to walk out after opening everyone’s eyes to the simplicity of consensus and said: “Once we accept the collective truth of the quorum, we then wait until other people TELL US that they believe in the truths we have thus extracted, and when even more strangers find our truths acceptable, then we will begin to share them with the world…”. With that, she opened the door and walked out into the night.

That’s it for story time kiddos — go brush your teeth!

- Mochimo Dev. Team, Father’s Day Edition 2018