On Mar 2, 2011, at 8:06 AM, Nick Mathewson wrote:
On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 1:34 AM, Sebastian Hahn hahn.seb@web.de wrote:
Design:
When the consensus is generated, the directory authorities ensure that a param is only included in the list of params if at least half of the total number of authorities votes for that param. The value chosen is the low-median of all the votes. We don't mandate that the authorities have to vote on exactly the same value for it to be included because some consensus parameters could be the result of active measurements that individual authorities make.
This is possibly bikeshed, but I would suggest that instead of requiring half of existing authorities to vote on a particular parameter, we require 3 or more to vote on it. (As a degenerate case, fall back to "at least half" if there are fewer than 6 authorities in the clique.)
Hrm. I'm not too happy with this, unless we also include a way for a majority of authorities to prevent voting on that parameter altogether. Doing the design as presented above would then be simpler.
I think we don't want the number to be _less_ than 3, since 3 is the smallest number of parties who can come up with a low-median that isn't just the diktat of a single member (1 party), or as low as either member wants it to be (2 parties).
Yes, anything less than 3 is bad imo.
Sebastian