What is Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT)?

Byzantine fault tolerance ( BFT) is the resilience of a fault-tolerant computer system to such conditions. A Byzantine fault is any fault presenting different symptoms to different observers. A Byzantine failure is the loss of a system service due to a Byzantine fault in systems that require consensus among distributed nodes.

Is a decentralized permissionless system a Byzantine fault tolerant system?

A decentralized, permissionless system is said to be Byzantine fault tolerant if it has solved the Byzantine Generals’ Problem — a problem that Bitcoin finally solved in a distributed manner. As it stands, anyone can join a decentralized, permissionless system and start broadcasting information.

Are Byzantine faults arbitrary?

Due to this, reliable communication of information over networks has become ever so important. In this paper, various fault tolerance mechanism was studied, among which tolerating Byzantine faults seemed the most challenging because of their arbitrary behavior.

Can digital signatures provide Byzantine fault tolerance?

A second solution requires unforgeable message signatures. For security-critical systems, digital signatures (in modern computer systems, this may be achieved in practice using public-key cryptography) can provide Byzantine fault tolerance in the presence of an arbitrary number of traitorous generals.