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Fundamental Problems

akwizgran edited this page 2023-06-12 16:34:19 +00:00

1. Privacy-connectivity tradeoff

   • We don't want to reveal that we're part of the network
   • But we can only communicate with those who know

2. Privacy-efficiency tradeoff

   • We don't want to reveal what data we're sending and receiving
   • But sending everything to everyone doesn't scale

3. Security-connectivity tradeoff

   • A device can use more of the network's resources than it contributes
   • We can use stable identities to manage resource allocation
   • But this limits us to exchanging data with known identities

4. Side-effects

   • Members of a group may receive messages in different orders
   • We can use rules to resolve conflicts and ensure eventual consistency
   • But processing a message can have side-effects that can't be reordered or undone

5. Consensus manipulation

   • Members of a group may receive messages in different orders
   • We can use rules to resolve conflicts and ensure eventual consistency
   • But the rules can be abused to manipulate the outcome

Problem 4 is one of the things that makes multi-device support difficult - although @grote's leader/follower idea could sidestep the problem.

We ran into problem 5 when working on private groups, and it's also affecting Matrix's room consensus algorithm at the moment.

At a very generic level, problems 4 and 5 can be solved with some kind of consensus mechanism in which a quorum of group members agree on an ordering of the messages. One of the key questions a mechanism like this needs to answer is who gets to be part of the quorum. If we can come up with a solution to this that's reusable across clients, it would be a very useful building block for Bramble-based systems.