Would you mind expanding on this? I thought the role of the arbiter is to decide who's the master at one point in time. And while this is helpful for the whole coordination process, (by the way I think a similar effect could be achieved with smart clients) this impacts availability on not durability per se.
Describing the arbiter's role as being to "decide who's the master" is an over-simplification. It's there to achieve quorum without which conflicting updates can occur.
No idea how architects handle this, but my guess is, this could be done either by relying on external reputation (i.e. knowing the arbiter outside of the network) or by network somehow rewarding buyers and sellers who take a risk to chose "newbies" as arbiters.
This is nice; I hadn't heard about m-of-n txns earlier.
But on the con side, unlimited, distributed arbitrators may not work out in practice. The more the number of arbitrators, the smaller the intersection set of arbitrators that are trusted by two unrelated parties.
Even if the arbiter is pure and just the company will learn how to represent its side in the best light before the arbiter; it has many chances to learn.
What do you think about potentially offering more complicated schemes in the future? For example, supporting say three arbitrators, requiring two to agree?
You could do this as follows:
Seller: Keys S1 and S2
Buyer: Keys B1 and B2
Arbitrators: Keys A1, A2, A3 (one per arbitrator)
You then do a 4-of-7 multisig transaction.
This generalizes to buyer, seller and N-of-M arbitrators:
This prototype had a single arbiter per transaction, but there is no reason why you couldn't have N arbiters on each transaction, for as high an N as you want.
Imagine having, say, three arbiters for each transaction, and two of the three have to side with one side in order for the money to be moved. This cuts down a lot on the potential problems, especially if the arbiters were kept anonymous from one another, thus preventing collusion and making sure that each investigation is independent from the others.
How often do you find yourself needing third-parties to arbitrate your interactions?
Because for me, outside some formal processes I do for my job, it has been well over a decade since I needed someone to mediate my interactions with someone else.
People are very good at conflict resolution. They only see the cases where it doesn't work out.
To my knowledge, not without a centralized arbiter which can then be evil, stupid, or taken over/destroyed by bad actors. Please correct me if I have the wrong info.
I think for big orgs there could be a two-man rule system like they use in minuteman missile control, two designated members have to both agree to delete a repo or anything seriously irreversible.
As long as there a dishonest people, you're either going to be a nightmare for sellers, a nightmare for buyers, a random nightmare, or you're going to have a lot of overhead to have competent people in a scalable organization arbitrate everything.
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