Consensus Mechanisms

Summary

This chapter explores how distributed networks achieve agreement without a central authority. Students will examine the major consensus algorithms — proof of work, proof of stake, and Byzantine fault tolerance variants — and understand the tradeoffs each makes between security, performance, and decentralization. The chapter also covers forks, finality, and the governance implications of consensus design choices.

Concepts Covered

This chapter covers the following 13 concepts from the learning graph:

  1. Consensus Mechanism
  2. Proof of Work
  3. Proof of Stake
  4. Delegated Proof of Stake
  5. Byzantine Generals Problem
  6. Byzantine Fault Tolerance
  7. Practical BFT
  8. Finality
  9. Fork
  10. Hard Fork
  11. Soft Fork
  12. Longest Chain Rule
  13. Blockchain Generations

Prerequisites

This chapter builds on concepts from:

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