Byzantine Generals, Russian Oligarchs and the Emperor

Proof of Stake, sire?

Re-imagining the Byzantine Generals problem for today, let us suppose that some of the generals are actually Russian Oligarchs in secret, and working with all the other generals for the Emperor.

Now they are discussing their wartime plans and decide to arrive at a consensus on the next steps. Since a lot of money will be spent on war preparations, the oligarchs convince the emperor and the generals to give themselves a higher number of votes, which to be apparently fair, will be in proportion to the money they contribute to the war effort.

Lets say there are 1000 generals including 35 oligarchs. Total votes 1000. In pure byzantine scenario oligarchs get only 35 votes. More than 2/3rds majority with the generals. As intended.

In the modified vote for stake scenario, lets say total money for the war effort is 1 billion dollars. And 35 oligarchs contribute 350M and the remaining 965 generals, 650M. Total votes 1 billion, oligarchs get 350M votes; veto power with the oligarchs. Hmm, slight change.

The original plan of the generals was to invade some region near the Bosporus, but the oligarchs manage to veto and outvote them every step to somehow divert the whole campaign towards Crimea. Whenever the war effort wanted to decide to go a bit left or a bit right, the oligarchs would vote to go a bit right steering the army towards their own goals. All this they did by just following the process and doing nothing illegal.

Seeing that there is some issue here, the Emperor brings in a “hard fork” to increase the number of generals to 10000 thinking that it will reduce the power of the oligarchs and give more power to the generals. However since all the new joinees did not have sufficient funds required, they reduced the joining fees to one fifth of what it was earlier. So a lot of people called degens (many that were not generals), started staking in the hope of getting their share of the rewards from the war bounty. They however made the war effort a bit insecure because they knew very little about war and did not contribute any service and were mostly absent from the campaigns and they did not bother to vote much either.

And as it turned out, the additional funds that came in were not more than 35% of the previous amount of 1 billion, which the oligarchs were able to make up for. Again, veto power remained with the oligarchs by pumping in just additional 35% of cash.

As we can see, the Byzantine Generals Problem was not solved properly with the infusion of stake from oligarchs, who cleverly hijacked the process to serve their own ends.

Finally, the thoughtful emperor decided to give one vote to everybody in the kingdom, regardless of the funds invested, and also will pick a random proper subset of voters to vote each time, using a mathematically random algorithm along with some important safety features.

Now the oligarchs realized that they will have to bribe 1/3rd of the country to get their veto power. Also even though a lot of degens did not participate in the voting, even after much education, it never got close to 33% for the oligarchs to regain their veto power. And incidentally, the people of the land generally voted for peace so the war problem was also solved amicably.

Phew.

Even the emperor seemed happy with that. All is well now.