So somewhere in the world, there are incredibly affluent individuals who can afford to fly first class Lufthansa often. They have their Byzantine Empire statue, their Basquiat over here, and then rubber duckies from Lufthansa. Lufthansa found, many years ago, when they created the lounge, they put little rubber duckies as decoration.
continuing unbroken. So let's get our terms right in the grand historical context. What is the Byzantine Empire, and why should we just call it the Roman Empire? - So Lex, the burden of proof is on those who would assert that what we've been calling the Byzantine Empire is something other-
So the EITs are having the same experience that you're having in terms of multiple epiphanies from them and how you engage. have to navigate this Byzantine system to get the appropriate visa to be able to start your company in the US.
In a fail-stop model, you assume that agents fail by crashing, and then they just never send any more messages. And in the Byzantine -fault tolerant model, you assume that agents can fail by behaving arbitrarily. So you can imagine an attacker takes over an agent and sends the worst possible messages with the goal of trying to mess everybody up.
Now, frankly, in my opinion, copyright desperately needs to be reformed anyway. It's Byzantine , and it's built around pre-existing systems that aren't even relevant anymore and haven't been for a very long time, for the most part. So I think that we currently live in a world where neither the consumer or the artist is being well served.
And on top of that, the purchase of silk was draining its gold. The problem was that Byzantines couldn't make silk. Most of it had to come through Persia, the very empire it was fighting.
- Yeah. Yeah, that... I could not agree more. There are some problems with, stable empire that is the Byzantine Empire protected the forces from everything that came from the east.
ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Anthony Kaldellis. You've described that the Byzantine Empire is the Roman Empire, that calling it the Byzantine Empire is an invention of historians writing long after the empire has collapsed, that the people of that time considered themselves Romans, and that the so-called Byzantine Empire never actually existed, that it was, in every legal and cultural sense, the Roman Empire
And what I have been wondering recently is if that's true. What if it's actually a good thing? What if it's actually a way to break free from a Byzantine monopolistic nightmare that we've been living under for the last 25 years? So, I'm nervous, but I'm actually kind of excited about Google Zero.
So they tell me. And it's like a sort of Byzantine voting scheme, that eventually we wind up with a ballot of 15 names, which is the one that was announced the other day.
And we'll see what that means. And then I'll discuss Federated Byzantine Agreement, which is a generalization of Byzantine Agreement, to a model that could actually accommodate this kind of internet-level consensus. Then I'll talk about failure resistance and how well we can do in terms of tolerating failures.
They just crashed. And they never output another message. What happens when you have Byzantine failure? So the big difference here is that when you have a Byzantine failure, the failed node, it can actually change its vote.
So the big difference here is that when you have a Byzantine failure, the failed node, it can actually change its vote. And the key idea in Federated Byzantine Agreement is that we're going to pick our quorums in a decentralized way.
So the big difference here is that when you have a Byzantine failure, the failed node, it can actually change its vote. So the first big difference between Federated Byzantine Agreement and the standard centralized Byzantine Agreement is that in the Federated model, failure
What happens when you have Byzantine failure? So the big difference here is that when you have a Byzantine failure, the failed node, it can actually change its vote. It can give inconsistent messages to different people.
So the big difference here is that when you have a Byzantine failure, the failed node, it can actually change its vote. And there exist long-standing solutions to the Byzantine agreement protocol in this problem, in this model.
So the big difference here is that when you have a Byzantine failure, the failed node, it can actually change its vote. Well, remember these Byzantine malicious nodes, they can give inconsistent messages to different people.
- Yeah. Yeah, that... I could not agree more. There are some problems with, And the thing that protected Europe for centuries was the existence of the Byzantine Empire, the East Roman Empire, because of all the threats-
But of course, people were always trying to steal it. By the mid-sixth century, the Byzantine Empire was in trouble. Plague had devastated the population.
So the big difference here is that when you have a Byzantine failure, the failed node, it can actually change its vote. So now I'm going to talk about this new model called Federated Byzantine Agreement, which is a generalization of standard Byzantine Agreement to a setting where you don't
So the big difference here is that when you have a Byzantine failure, the failed node, it can actually change its vote. that statement settled. So a Federated Byzantine Agreement system is basically a set of nodes V and a quorum function Q, where Q of V is the set of slices
- The following is a conversation with Lars Brownworth, a historian and author of many excellent history books, including The Sea Wolves: A History of the Vikings and The Normans: From Raiders to Kings. He's also the host of two history podcast series. The first called 12 Byzantine Rulers: The History of the Byzantine Empire is one of the first, if not the first ever, history podcasts launched over 20 years ago in June, 2005. His second series, Norman Centuries, explores the remarkable
- Yeah. Yeah, that... I could not agree more. There are some problems with, And then you also, you have another book that talks about the Byzantine Empire, so you have the creative destruction that resulted in Europe,
You've described that the Byzantine Empire is the Roman Empire, that calling it the Byzantine Empire is an invention of historians writing long after the empire has collapsed, that the people of that time considered themselves Romans, and that the so-called Byzantine Empire never actually existed, that it was, in every legal and cultural sense, the Roman Empire continuing unbroken. So let's get our terms right in the grand historical context.
And to this day, the Turks and those in their sphere of influence in Syria or in the Balkans talk about Rumi as Mevlana. And he was called Rumi because he was a Roman, a Byzantine citizen. Came to Konya because of Genghis Khan, and his massacres in Afghanistan and the Muslim East at the time.
We don't have to read him in Arabic and Latin. So actually, we get Plato and Aristotle from the Byzantine Empire, which was basically the remnants of the Roman Empire. After it had collapsed in the West, it survived in the East.
So here's an outline of what I'll talk. First, I'm going to give some background and cover Byzantine Agreement. But I'm going to kind of present it-- there's a novel twist.
So the big difference here is that when you have a Byzantine failure, the failed node, it can actually change its vote. So in fact, the property that's necessary for safety in the presence of Byzantine failures is that we need quorum intersection despite the behavior of any ill-behaved nodes.
So that's the promise. It's a beautiful country and it's got great, not just Byzantine sites, but ancient Roman sites.
was the time of the great kulits that ruled from North Africa through Central Asia the reason we think of the Middle Ages as the Dark Ages in the western world uh is largely because of course the Holy Roman Empire and the Byzantine empire were very weak and of course this was uh this was certainly a dark period from the Western standpoint it was a
And now, dear friends, here's Lars Brownworth. Your writing and podcasts take us from the Vikings to the Normans to Crusades, to the collapse of the East Roman Empire, also known as the Byzantine Empire. There's a thread, I think, that connects the Vikings through all of it, so let's start at the beginning. Let's start with the Vikings.
- Yeah. Yeah, that... I could not agree more. There are some problems with, And that's certainly the history of Christianity has a big role to play in the history of Europe, in the history of the Byzantine Empire,
old man. He was- he was very old, and he was tiny, and he was a eunuch, and the Goths laughed at him, but he had the last laugh. - The following is a conversation with Anthony Kaldellis, a historian of the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as the Byzantine Empire. This is a Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me,
What is the Byzantine Empire, and why should we just call it the Roman Empire? - So Lex, the burden of proof is on those who would assert that what we've been calling the Byzantine Empire is something other- ... than the Roman Empire, because all of our sources are very clear about this. And we've known about this. We've always known about it. It's almost a form of cognitive dissonance, right?
beyond. So there are a number of reasons why Western Europeans wanted to think that the Eastern Empire is something different, and those reasons have created these models where They were, they called it Empire of the Greeks for 1,000 years, then they switched to Byzantine Empire for very political reasons. Now that's collapsing. So we're now moving into a phase where we have the long Roman Empire. We, we recognize that the history of the Roman state, the Roman polity,
- Yes. - And then the West and East Roman Empire. - Yes. - Uh, and then maybe what are the different terms that we could be using for the Byzantine Empire, including Byzantium? Is it also fair to say the Late Roman Empire?
But not Hadrian and someone, you know, an emperor a few centuries later who's just like him, bilingual in Greek and Latin, who's ... kinda cosmopolitan, who, you know, reads the same stuff, because we posit this rupture between Roman and Byzantine . - One of the ways we can try to analyze this is, for example, looking at a very specific role in society across time. So we can look at soldiers,
Other times, the people come out 'cause they hate the emperor, and they drag the emperor out and cut his nose off or - And we should say, going to Perplexity here, the Hippodrome of Constantinople was the main stadium and social center of the Byzantine capital,
So rather than raise property taxes, rather than raise taxes, which is politically difficult, the police department in Ferguson essentially operated as a means of extracting revenue and preying upon the mostly black residents of the city and constructed all sorts of increasingly insane, enraging, and Byzantine means of doing this, including municipal court summons. You get a ticket for $100.
This is the mosque that the Muslims built back in the 7th century. And you can see straight away how blended that is, just looking at it, with the dome there, which is reminiscent of the Byzantine style of architecture, and the gable there taken from the Hellenistic period.
So the big difference here is that when you have a Byzantine failure, the failed node, it can actually change its vote. that means, if you want an honest node in there, then the greatest number of Byzantine failures you can tolerate is going to be 2T minus N minus 1.
So the big difference here is that when you have a Byzantine failure, the failed node, it can actually change its vote. So to summarize, let's say you have a set U of well-behaved nodes in a Federated Byzantine Agreement system.
So the big difference here is that when you have a Byzantine failure, the failed node, it can actually change its vote. So now the question is, can we actually achieve this kind of optimal failure resistance in a Federated Byzantine Agreement system?
Jerry Holkins: And I, you know, so we started to host it elsewhere which was, you know, and at the time was a byzantine process. But I wrote some -