Surely the greatest irony in the blockchain space is that there has never been any agreement on "The best" consensus model.
How does it achieve this? Through a new consensus method, called Proof of History.
Proof of History aims to lighten the load of the network nodes in processing blocks by providing a means of encoding time itself into the blockchain.
In a regular blockchain, reaching consensus over the time a particular block was mined is as much a requirement as reaching consensus over the existence of the transactions in that block.
In PoS, network participants stake tokens for the chance of being the next block miner and receiving the associated rewards.
Solana deploys Tower BFT to introduce the assurance to network participants that bad actors will be penalized by having their stake "Slashed" if they're found to be voting against PoH. By itself, PoS is also vulnerable to long-range attacks, whereby earlier participants could hijack the chain by disputing the blocks produced by participants who joined later.
Tower BFT prevents such attacks by canonicalizing blocks that have received votes of more than two-thirds of the network.
Delegated proof-of-stake is used by EOS and others to achieve a faster throughput by delegating block production to a small number of network participants.
In EOS, there are only 21 block producers that control the network.
There's a risk that voters aggregate together to attempt to manipulate the block producer elections in their favor, as has been alleged with EOS. The protocol relies solely on the voting population to elect block producers who will act in the interests of the network.
Proof of History is the latest consensus model, but how does it compare to its predecessors?
Published on Nov 22, 2019
by Cryptoslate | Published on Coinage
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