I don't understand the distinction you are making between a distributed ledger and distributed consistency.
I suspect it will be easy to create a byzantine error avalanche with your current design - or break consistency (eg. different views).
I'd be keen to see what aphyr could do with a jepsen test. Perhaps you could run an open hack matrix contest to see what people can achieve. It might surprise you.
I'm saying that Matrix does not aim to be globally consistent within a room, or even seek consensus.
It's perfectly valid and indeed desirable for the network to partition, and for one side of the network to go off talking amongst itself, and the other side to continue, and then for the conversation to join up again afterwards.
Different views are a feature. Imagine you're using P2P Matrix to stay in touch while hiking - you fire up adhoc wifi, use mDNS to discover other peers, and get chatting away. Some people drift in and out of contact, and perhaps even the party splits. But the conversation continues fine for those still present in it. Nobody can spoof each other's messages; nobody can replay each other's messages; nobody can reorder messages; the worst that can happen is for messages to get withheld, maliciously or otherwise.
> I'd be keen to see what aphyr could do with a jepsen test.
Me too. We're overdue an audit, and we'll reach out (assuming he's not too fiendishly expensive).
> Perhaps you could run an open hack matrix contest to see what people can achieve. It might surprise you.
There's already quite a high incentive on the open network to show off by exploiting bugs in Matrix - which is what helped accelerate the v2 of the state resolution algorithm that I tried to link earlier.
Separately, the French government maintains a bounty for their Matrix deployment over at https://yeswehack.com/programs/tchap - and we're also looking forward to an academic paper being published in the coming weeks which is a super deep dive into analysing and auditing our state resolution alg. It might surprise you.
I suspect it will be easy to create a byzantine error avalanche with your current design - or break consistency (eg. different views).
I'd be keen to see what aphyr could do with a jepsen test. Perhaps you could run an open hack matrix contest to see what people can achieve. It might surprise you.