Byzantine Participants

Definition ∞ Byzantine Participants are nodes within a distributed system that may act maliciously or fail in arbitrary ways, including sending conflicting information. These participants do not adhere to the protocol’s expected behavior, posing a challenge to achieving consensus. Their presence necessitates robust fault-tolerance mechanisms in decentralized networks.
Context ∞ The concept of Byzantine participants is fundamental to understanding the security and resilience of blockchain consensus mechanisms, particularly in the context of the Byzantine Fault Tolerance problem. Designing protocols that can function correctly despite the presence of such actors is a central concern for decentralized systems. News regarding network attacks often involves scenarios where malicious participants attempt to disrupt operations.