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Re:Safety, liveness and fault tolerance—the consensus choices by polymathist on Saturday December 06, 2014 @01:28PM (#8709797)
I'm just guessing here, and I hope that Joyce or someone from Stellar could correct me if I'm wrong. It could be as simple as announcing that you're going to make this change to de-decentralize, describing what that process entails, and asking all the invested parties (in this case validating nodes) to follow suit. I imagine that the process is similar to when bitcoin has done a hard fork in the past. The bitcoin core developers see the need for a hard fork, announce the hard fork, and ask everyone to update. If the majority of nodes agree than the hard fork was successful. So in Stellar's case, they could be asking people who run validating nodes to update their software, or to simply modify their UNL to point to only a single node (similar to seeding your bitcoin client with only a single peer). I think (and hope) that the Stellar Foundation doesn't have the ability to actually force people to de-decentralize.
Re:Safety, liveness and fault tolerance—the consensus choices by joyce on Saturday December 06, 2014 @03:17PM (#8710036)
Howdy - so at the time of the ledger fork, the Foundation was running all 5 of the validating nodes and there were other parties not associated with us that were running non-validating nodes.

We do not have the ability nor do we want the ability to control other people's nodes.

Since Stellar only launched 4 months ago, the number nodes in the network was still small. In the future, when the network is on the new consensus system and able to run safely in a truly decentralized, then it would be up to individual nodes to decide what to do.

Hope that clarifies things.

Re:Safety, liveness and fault tolerance—the consensus choices by themusicgod1 on Saturday December 06, 2014 @10:55PM (#8711180)
Why wasn't anyone else running a validating node? Where is the code for the validating node?