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Simplified Byzantine Fault Tolerance

1 min read
Pronunciation
[sim-pluh-fahyd biz-uhn-teen fawlt tol-er-uhns]
Analogy
Imagine a complex voting system for a committee (traditional BFT) that has many rules and rounds to ensure a fair outcome even with some dishonest members. Simplified BFT is like streamlining this voting process, perhaps by reducing the number of voting rounds or making some assumptions about participant behavior (e.g., in a permissioned setting), to make it faster and easier to manage, while still ensuring a reliable decision.
Definition
A variation or specific implementation of a Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus algorithm that aims to be simpler to implement or more efficient in certain contexts than traditional BFT protocols like PBFT, while still providing guarantees against faulty or malicious nodes.
Key Points Intro
SBFT algorithms aim to offer BFT guarantees with reduced complexity or improved performance for specific environments.
Key Points

A variant of Byzantine Fault Tolerance.

Often designed for specific network conditions or trust assumptions (e.g., permissioned networks).

May make trade-offs to achieve simplicity or efficiency, for instance, by optimizing message complexity or rounds of communication.

Still aims to allow the network to reach consensus even if a certain fraction of nodes are malicious.

Example
Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP) has BFT properties and could be considered a form of SBFT due to its unique federated approach with quorum slices. Some permissioned ledger systems might implement their own flavors of SBFT tailored to their needs.
Technical Deep Dive
SBFT implementations might optimize aspects of classical BFT (like PBFT's O(n^2) message complexity) by leveraging specific network structures, limiting the number of active validators, or using different communication patterns. The 'simplification' can refer to the protocol logic, the assumptions about the network, or the ease of implementation and verification. The exact guarantees and failure tolerance (e.g., tolerating 'f' faulty nodes out of '3f+1' or '2f+1') depend on the specific SBFT algorithm.
Caveat
The term 'Simplified' can be relative. While an SBFT algorithm might be simpler in some respects than a full classical BFT, it still involves complex distributed consensus logic. The specific trade-offs made for simplification must be understood to assess its security in a given context.
Related Terms
Consensus
Permissioned Blockchain

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