Censorship

Censorship or denial of service could occur when a 1/3rd of the bond holders refuse to validate any sequences with new bonds. The protocol can defend against this form of attack by dynamically adjusting how fast bonds become stale. In the event of a denial of service, the larger partition will be designed to fork and censor the Byzantine bond holders. The larger network will recover as the Byzantine bonds become stale with time. The smaller Byzantine partition would not be able to move forward for a longer period of time. The algorithm would work as follows. A majority of the network would elect a new Leader. The Leader would then censor the Byzantine bond holders from participating. Proof of History generator would have to continue generating a sequence, to prove the passage of time, until enough Byzantine bonds have become stale so the bigger network has a super majority. The rate at which bonds become stale would be dynamically based on what percentage of bonds are active. So the Byzantine minority fork of the network would have to wait much longer than the majority fork to recover a super majority. Once a super majority has been established, slashing could be used to permanently punish the Byzantine bond holders.