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Byzantine Generals and Nakamoto Consensus · jtobin.io

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In one of his early emails on the Cryptography mailing list, Satoshi claimed that the proof-of-work chain is a solution to the Byzantine Generals Problem (BGP). He describes this via an example where a bunch of generals – Byzantine ones, of course – collude to break a king’s wifi.

Byzantine Generals and Nakamoto Consensus · jtobin.io jtobin.io © 2026 Jared Tobin. CC BY 4.0 . Byzantine Generals and Nakamoto Consensus 22 Jan 2018 You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity. – Richard Feynman (attributed) In one of his early emails on the Cryptography mailing list, Satoshi claimed that the proof-of-work chain is a solution to the Byzantine Generals Problem (BGP). He describes this via an example where a bunch of generals – Byzantine ones, of course – collude to break a king’s wifi. It’s interesting to look at this a little closer in the language of the

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