It will be interesting to see what other networks besides SAFE adopt this consensus mechanism.
As I understood, after quick scan of the paper, consensus is achieved by simple majority vote.
So if I setup 10,000 docker containers running malicious nodes, I could take over the network and forge any blocks I want.
What I am missing?
There are many consensus algorithms that are not POW and they work perfectly fine, we cite some in the paper. Many require trusted nodes etc. and that is not so great, however, the work in this field of distributed consensus is increasingly popular. If you duckduckgo for BFT or PBFT algorithms and derivations you will find plenty. This one is very asynchronous and requires no trusted setup phase or threshold signature mechanism, making it an attractive choice.
In its plain form, as described then if you managed to get over 1/3 nodes on the network you could defeat consensus. Its use in SAFE is for valid voting nodes and then you would a much larger proportion than 1/3 of the network. Not only that, but they would have to be online and well behaved for longer than the existing network nodes. It is then much more expensive than a 1/3 attack.
Hope that helps.
Still need to dig deeper into it, and would love to hear other peoples' evaluations, but at a first glance, PARSEC could actually be a serious player in the DLT game.
So proof-of-work is inherently resistant to sybil attacks while PARSEC on its own isn’t, so to tell the story properly the random but deterministic relocating of nodes needs to be included.
If smarter people than me can mathematically verify the PARSEC algorithm as valid, it may lead the way for a radical change to the way information is propagated, secured and validated.
