OKX Blockchain 60 Lectures | Episode 14: What is the Byzantine Generals Problem?
"OKX Blockchain 60 Lectures" is a blockchain educational animation series jointly produced by OKX and Sina Technology. Aimed at users with zero knowledge of blockchain, it uses articles, animated videos, and other formats to vividly explain blockchain concepts through five major sections and 60 knowledge points, covering concepts, technology, and applications. The content of this episode was guided and reviewed by Xiongma, founder of FIBOS.
Hello everyone, I'm Xiao K. Today we're going to talk about: "What is the Byzantine Generals Problem"?
As we mentioned before, the distributed ledger can be considered the framework of blockchain — everyone can freely participate and collectively process data in the blockchain. Based on this, blockchain is essentially a large distributed computing network.
There is no central command center issuing orders. The entire network is completely decentralized, relying on different nodes exchanging information with each other, reaching consensus, and acting in unison — the whole process is like an unstructured group discussion.
Someone raised a question: what if a node sends erroneous information that disrupts the normal operation of the network, or what if everyone disagrees? So scholars established a model to uniformly describe such problems concerning consistency in distributed systems, calling it the Byzantine Generals Problem.
The Byzantine Generals Problem is as follows:
The Byzantine Empire wanted to attack a country, sending multiple armies to besiege it. But the enemy nation also had strong military strength, and the generals had to launch their attacks simultaneously at the same time to win.
The problem is that each general is scattered around the enemy nation and can only communicate with each other via messengers on horseback to determine the time of attack. However, on one hand, messengers may be killed by the enemy during delivery, and on the other hand, according to unreliable reports, there are traitors among these generals. Traitors may arbitrarily change their attack intentions or timing and deliver false orders to other generals, affecting their judgment.
If the entire distributed network corresponds to the Byzantine Empire, and each node corresponds to a general within it, then under such conditions, how can all nodes in the network reach agreement on something? (That is, the generals launch their attacks simultaneously at the same time to win the battle.) This is the Byzantine Generals Problem.
So in simple terms, the Byzantine Generals Problem describes two issues that distributed networks face:
1) How to solve the synchronization problem between nodes. For example, in the case without traitors, when General A passes an attack plan to other generals (e.g., "attack tomorrow at 2 PM"), General B might also be passing an attack plan (e.g., "attack tomorrow at 3 PM").
2) How to solve the problem of malicious nodes deliberately sending erroneous information to disrupt network operation. For example, in the case with traitors, traitors will send different attack proposals to different generals, preventing other generals from reaching consensus.
Later, people realized that it is impossible for every node in a distributed network to be error-free, so someone proposed the concept of "Byzantine Fault Tolerance" to solve the Byzantine Generals Problem. The key insight of this solution is that the forging or error of information is not important — as long as the number of honest generals exceeds two-thirds of the total, even with a minority of dishonest generals, the entire system can reach consensus.
Based on this, people designed many solutions.
The consensus mechanism — one of the four core technologies of blockchain — was born to solve this problem. As for how exactly it solves the problem, allow Xiao K to leave you in suspense. We'll cover that in the next lesson.
Special thanks to Teacher Xiongma for his assistance and guidance on this episode.
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