[bitcoin-dev] Pedantic note on the use of "eventual consistency" to describe Bitcoin [Was: Let's deploy BIP65 CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY!]

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 10:14 PM, Jorge Timón
<bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> reason you don't think guaranteed eventual consistency has any value

Obligatory pedantic correction: In Bitcoin we don't actually achieve
"eventual consistency" of the kind which is usually described in the
literature. In Bitcoin the probability of reorg to a particular point
diminishes over time but never is guaranteed to be _zero_ (at least
within the framework of bitcoin itself), and at the same time we have
stronger ordering properties than is normally implied by eventual
consistency (so, e.g. an update may never happen if its conflicted
first).

This is completely irrelevant to your point-- soft forks obey the
normal consistency process for bitcoin where a hard fork (especially a
mutual one) does not... but I'm sure there is an academic out there
that cringes when we use the words "eventual consistency" to describe
Bitcoin, and I feel like I'd be remiss to not offer this minor
correction. :)