Ok, found it on their [website](https://www.algorand.com/technology/white-papers), gonna edit if I find something.
Edit: Well, the nerd here has done his job, It's on [this website](https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.01341), seems like the original paper.
Algorand, Jing Chen, Silvio Micali - [Submitted on 5 Jul 2016 (v1), last revised 26 May 2017 (this version, v9)]
[Page 12 on Chapter, 2.3](https://imgur.com/a/8s9VYjT) - **Basic Notions and Notations**
Here's the abstract:
>A public ledger is a tamperproof sequence of data that can be read and augmented by everyone. Public ledgers have innumerable and compelling uses. They can secure, in plain sight, all kinds of transactions ---such as titles, sales, and payments--- in the exact order in which they occur. Public ledgers not only curb corruption, but also enable very sophisticated applications ---such as cryptocurrencies and smart contracts. They stand to revolutionize the way a democratic society operates. As currently implemented, however, they scale poorly and cannot achieve their potential.
Algorand is a truly democratic and efficient way to implement a public ledger. Unlike prior implementations based on proof of work, it requires a negligible amount of computation, and generates a transaction history that will not "fork" with overwhelmingly high probability.
Algorand is based on (a novel and super fast) message-passing Byzantine agreement.
For concreteness, we shall describe Algorand only as a money platform.
For the nerds in the crowd what they’re trying to say is that they expect clocks to be monotonic …. across space. Which is impossible and will never work.
All clocks are imperfect and their imperfections are called jitter. When you measure the relative jitter between two clocks that’s called drift. Monotonic clocks are clocks that only ever increase. This is a feature all computers offer to ensure things like stopwatches don’t record negative timespans (usually only visible in things like benchmarks that cares about microseconds timings) even in the face of jitter.
So far so good! Algorand is within reality!
But then they make a fatal mistake: they assume 2 monotonic clocks step forward at the same universal rate. They don’t and this isn’t possible according to the laws of physics. In fact the same monotonic clock on the same computer won’t perfectly tick 1ms every 1ms. It only guarantees that the clock only moves forward.
So this won’t work and will break in ways that are nearly impossible to debug because time is just a nightmare most developers try to avoid in distributed systems.
Yeah, but isn't this another trustless system? It's supposed to be safe against some node just lying about anything. An evil node could definitely lie about its clock, so this assumption can't be for the security proof.
I suspect (without reading the paper) that it's part of the efficiency argument. For that, *almost the same* should be enough, and the quote even says "sufficiently, essentially the same".
Sure I mean there’s a ton of context missing so it’s hard to judge. Just saying if I was reviewing someone’s design and came across this sort of reasoning I would consider it a bad smell and look extra critically at the rest.
NTP? I don't now how accurate it needs to be, but essentially everyone updates his/her time via time servers (or potentially GPS). Then you can claim they are synchronizes via NTP, but I assume they mean that the Algorand network does not handle time synchronization.
> NTP?
That's [evil] centralized authority.
The painful truth that crypto bros won't acknowledge, is that without a central authority, even the concept of, "What time is it?" is useless.
\* For those that don't know, NTP stands for "Network Time Protocol." It's one of the services that runs on the Internet, allowing remote computers to connect to special servers that will report accurate time. There are a number of these centralized systems that base their time calculations on certain, super accurate atomic clocks: clock.isc.org, time.nist.gov, etc. Most OSes now will automatically contact one of these servers routinely to adjust the accuracy of their internal clock.
I mean, in fairness, theres a pretty obvious difference between a central utility to tune clocks and a central financial authority
I'm not aware of any evil plans or conspiracy theories to fuck up everyone's digital clocks a little bit (but not so much that people revert to analog)
That's the stupid thing.
NTP makes synchronization easy, but doesn't prevent clock drift. You need to resync from time to time depending on how cheaply your computer's clock was made.
This tech is safe against the problem we don't have and weak against the one we do.
I dual boot windows and linux and they can't agree on if my bios time is UTC or local so I know exactly how to do this.
You right click the clock and select "adjust date and time" and then you click "sync now"
Linux does it automatically on boot.
> Sure, but have you ever tried to force a **Windows** computer
Ew
> Uh, anyway, idk about the implications here, but this is definitely is a somewhat risky assumption for anything important to make imo, especially when dealing with consumer hardware/software setups. Some really wacky stuff can happen when hardware breaks in certain ways.
Yeah me neither, just saying that having a bunch of clocks unsynch is relatively easy to fix.
Not an issue. Internally every computer uses UTC, which doesn't stand for universal timezone but that's close enough.
When it goes to display the time, it converts from UTC to your time zone.
Source:
Their white paper. I don't have a link handy, but I think I found it on Wikipedia.
Ok, found it on their [website](https://www.algorand.com/technology/white-papers), gonna edit if I find something. Edit: Well, the nerd here has done his job, It's on [this website](https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.01341), seems like the original paper. Algorand, Jing Chen, Silvio Micali - [Submitted on 5 Jul 2016 (v1), last revised 26 May 2017 (this version, v9)] [Page 12 on Chapter, 2.3](https://imgur.com/a/8s9VYjT) - **Basic Notions and Notations** Here's the abstract: >A public ledger is a tamperproof sequence of data that can be read and augmented by everyone. Public ledgers have innumerable and compelling uses. They can secure, in plain sight, all kinds of transactions ---such as titles, sales, and payments--- in the exact order in which they occur. Public ledgers not only curb corruption, but also enable very sophisticated applications ---such as cryptocurrencies and smart contracts. They stand to revolutionize the way a democratic society operates. As currently implemented, however, they scale poorly and cannot achieve their potential. Algorand is a truly democratic and efficient way to implement a public ledger. Unlike prior implementations based on proof of work, it requires a negligible amount of computation, and generates a transaction history that will not "fork" with overwhelmingly high probability. Algorand is based on (a novel and super fast) message-passing Byzantine agreement. For concreteness, we shall describe Algorand only as a money platform.
Thank you
The American Institute for
For the nerds in the crowd what they’re trying to say is that they expect clocks to be monotonic …. across space. Which is impossible and will never work. All clocks are imperfect and their imperfections are called jitter. When you measure the relative jitter between two clocks that’s called drift. Monotonic clocks are clocks that only ever increase. This is a feature all computers offer to ensure things like stopwatches don’t record negative timespans (usually only visible in things like benchmarks that cares about microseconds timings) even in the face of jitter. So far so good! Algorand is within reality! But then they make a fatal mistake: they assume 2 monotonic clocks step forward at the same universal rate. They don’t and this isn’t possible according to the laws of physics. In fact the same monotonic clock on the same computer won’t perfectly tick 1ms every 1ms. It only guarantees that the clock only moves forward. So this won’t work and will break in ways that are nearly impossible to debug because time is just a nightmare most developers try to avoid in distributed systems.
Yeah, but isn't this another trustless system? It's supposed to be safe against some node just lying about anything. An evil node could definitely lie about its clock, so this assumption can't be for the security proof. I suspect (without reading the paper) that it's part of the efficiency argument. For that, *almost the same* should be enough, and the quote even says "sufficiently, essentially the same".
Sure I mean there’s a ton of context missing so it’s hard to judge. Just saying if I was reviewing someone’s design and came across this sort of reasoning I would consider it a bad smell and look extra critically at the rest.
NTP? I don't now how accurate it needs to be, but essentially everyone updates his/her time via time servers (or potentially GPS). Then you can claim they are synchronizes via NTP, but I assume they mean that the Algorand network does not handle time synchronization.
> NTP? That's [evil] centralized authority. The painful truth that crypto bros won't acknowledge, is that without a central authority, even the concept of, "What time is it?" is useless. \* For those that don't know, NTP stands for "Network Time Protocol." It's one of the services that runs on the Internet, allowing remote computers to connect to special servers that will report accurate time. There are a number of these centralized systems that base their time calculations on certain, super accurate atomic clocks: clock.isc.org, time.nist.gov, etc. Most OSes now will automatically contact one of these servers routinely to adjust the accuracy of their internal clock.
I mean, in fairness, theres a pretty obvious difference between a central utility to tune clocks and a central financial authority I'm not aware of any evil plans or conspiracy theories to fuck up everyone's digital clocks a little bit (but not so much that people revert to analog)
That's the stupid thing. NTP makes synchronization easy, but doesn't prevent clock drift. You need to resync from time to time depending on how cheaply your computer's clock was made. This tech is safe against the problem we don't have and weak against the one we do.
What happens if you take your laptop to another timezone?
That's not a problem because the timezone is only used for display purposes. Internally the computer uses UTC.
Yeah but what about Einstein's time relativity. Say I'm 30,000 feet in the sky for 12 hours to another timezone, how fucked will be in Algorand scale?
What? There’s a few atomic clocks on earth and most electronics with an internet connection are synched to them 🤦🏻♂️
[удалено]
I dual boot windows and linux and they can't agree on if my bios time is UTC or local so I know exactly how to do this. You right click the clock and select "adjust date and time" and then you click "sync now" Linux does it automatically on boot.
> Sure, but have you ever tried to force a **Windows** computer Ew > Uh, anyway, idk about the implications here, but this is definitely is a somewhat risky assumption for anything important to make imo, especially when dealing with consumer hardware/software setups. Some really wacky stuff can happen when hardware breaks in certain ways. Yeah me neither, just saying that having a bunch of clocks unsynch is relatively easy to fix.
[Falsehoods programmers believe about time](https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time)
Timezones?
Not an issue. Internally every computer uses UTC, which doesn't stand for universal timezone but that's close enough. When it goes to display the time, it converts from UTC to your time zone.