What is the Byzantine Generals’ Problem?

The Byzantine Generals' Problem is a popular game theory query, one which studies rational behavior in decision-making. It draws on a hypothetical historical scenario to illustrate a common problem: in a decentralized network where no participant can verify the identity or reputation of others, how can participants know who is telling the truth?

The Byzantine Generals' Problem

In the Byzantine Generals' Problem, the scenario involves multiple regiments of the Byzantine army stationed at various areas outside an enemy city.

The generals in charge of each regiment must coordinate together to launch an attack that can overcome enemy defenses. Each general can use a messenger to communicate with the others, but there is no way of knowing whether the message has been intercepted and tampered with by the enemy. The only way to launch a successful attack is to find a way to ensure that a sufficient number of generals are honest and will lead their regiments into the attack.

One potential solution for the problem is for the commander to send a command to attack or retreat to all the generals. Upon receipt, each general must decide whether to attack or retreat and send their vote back to the commander and to all other generals. Each general collects votes from the other generals, and if any are not consistent, they ignore the votes from the dissenting generals. The generals use the majority to choose whether to attack or retreat, send the decision back to the commander, and it is executed.

History of the Byzantine Generals' Problem in distributed technology

The problem of coordinating consensus among participants in distributed systems was first identified by computer scientists in the late 1970s.

In 1982, Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak, and Marshall Pease published a paper called “The Byzantine Generals' Problem,” which states that “a reliable computer system must be able to cope with the failure of one or more of its components. A failed component may exhibit a type of behavior that is often overlooked--namely, sending conflicting information to different parts of the system.”

In this definition, a system may still be deemed reliable even if one or more components have failed. It leads to the concept of “Byzantine Fault Tolerance” in a distributed system, which provides a measure of the ability for a system (or generals) to resist a certain amount of failure and still collaborate to make a system work.

In the late 1990s, two researchers, Barbara Liskov and Miguel Castro, developed a consensus algorithm for distributed networks called Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (pBFT). However, a major flaw was found when the time taken to reach consensus increased exponentially with the number of nodes on the network. Nevertheless, it was significant enough that variations of pBFT are still used today in contemporary blockchain systems such as Zilliqa and Cosmos.

A breakthrough in addressing the Byzantine Generals' Problem occurred in 2008 when Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper, which introduced the proof of work (PoW) algorithm.

How Bitcoin addresses the Byzantine Generals' Problem

Bitcoin relies on a decentralized network of miners that collaborate to maintain a pristine ledger of BTC transactions. Each miner must be able to trust that transactions added to the ledger are true. Relating Bitcoin to the Byzantine Generals’ Problem, the miners are the generals, and the ledger and transactions are the messages.

Under the PoW algorithm, all Bitcoin miners must agree that a transaction is valid before it is added to the blockchain. Miners validate transactions using the historical information on the ledger to check that the necessary account balances are available. If they encounter a transaction that appears contradictory to the existing data, they have the power to reject it.

However, once a transaction has been validated, it is recorded on the ledger permanently, meaning that anyone can trust the history of transaction data. Since every miner on the network has a copy of the same data, it can always be verified as true.

One of the most significant developments Satoshi made in addressing the Byzantine Generals' Problem was in the use of game theory to incentivize miners to act in a way that’s beneficial to the entire network.

Miners invest significant amounts of energy to participate in mining, and they receive BTC as reward for their efforts. If the ledger was corrupted with false transactions, trust in BTC would fall, and so would the value. These incentives have proven compelling enough that the Bitcoin network has never been successfully attacked since the genesis block in 2009.

Proof of work effectively addresses the Byzantine Generals' Problem to the extent that there has never been a 51% attack against Bitcoin. However, this doesn’t mean it’s impossible to launch an attack on Bitcoin – only that to do so would be financially prohibitive.

Byzantine Generals' Problem essentials

• The Byzantine Generals' Problem is a game theory problem used to describe the challenges of reaching consensus in distributed networks.
• Theoretical generals are trying to attack a city but need a way to communicate securely to coordinate a successful attack.
• Bitcoin’s proof of work has proven to be a very effective way to address the Byzantine Generals' Problem, using game theory to incentivize miners to maintain a clean ledger of BTC transactions.