It’s interesting, but bitcoin or Ethereum don’t solve the byzantine generals problem. Their solution would be one general send up smoke signals to the other general and that does not work as the enemy can see them.
So encrypting those smoke signals might work if both generals can encrypt/decrypt etc.
Anyway, this is a deeper thing in many ways. POW forces people to buy in (via equipment and electricity) and it’s so expensive that nobody can theoretically own >50%. (or colludes)
POS is similar but uses currency directly to buy in, hoping that nobody buys >50% (or colludes)
In our system atm the “cost” of becoming an elder is linked to the behaviour of a node over time. A well-behaved very long-lived node might become an elder. The section it can become and elder is unknown to it and not calculable up front.
All of these depend on non colluding to various degrees. For us maybe elders colude, but the keys they use (consensus keys) are not persistent. So to collude you first need to be running a crooked version of the software. That sounds doable, but would you, if you were a crook, run code given to you by another crook?
It’s a long deep area for sure. Ideally, we look to a solution where Elders cannot steal, I,e. they cannot create money. There is work happening there and it looks promising, but politically an issue in some ways.
So our elders can only agree to a DBC spend to not, but they cannot manipulate a dbc transfer, they can only deny it. There are easy fixes for that, such as allowing any section to validate any spend, but we don’t need that right now. I feel there are better, simpler ways to do this.
Staking some rewards is an option that is floated around a lot and is likely a good idea to penalise bad behaviour. In our system, that would mean denying spends for the elder’s dbc until a certain point, possible where the elder cashes in and leaves the network.