Crypto Academy Week 13 - Homework Post for - The Stellar Consensus Algorithm

Stellar Consensus Protocol

The stellar consensus protocol was described by David Mazieres in a whitepaper in the year 2015 working as a federated byzantine agreement system where a group of people or an organization working together to get the same result. This also makes sure all participants are opportune to access its transaction history at any point in time.

Stellar consensus protocol act as message conveyers to people or between a blockchain network and before all the messages are conveyed. The leader and all active nodes had to come to an agreement as to the type of message that that will be passed along without the third party getting a grip of the message. Part of the reason for stellar consensus was to bring good and adequate communication between sets of people.

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The stellar platform came into use to solve the problem facing the use of services that are not too good, its main aim was to make all services accessible in the Blockchain network and this came into play in the year 2014.

Consensus on the other hand deals with a ledger agreement stating that actual information put into place is correct and accurate giving it the ability to be accepted by its final user. We know it isn’t a possible thing to have an agreement between groups of people having trust issues.

That was when a protocol is implemented and Stellar consensus protocol came into view. Even when consensus came into play, most people find it hard to understand and think it’s absurd due to its federated voting.

Federated Byzantine Agreement

In this protocol, there is an open membership to all and sundry bringing decentralization into play thereby making nodes understand that verification may not be known ahead of time or it’s not a must they know themselves before reaching an agreement. An agreement may not be reached if all nodes didn’t come into unison and this may delay block validation.

Quorum slice

To make sure an agreement is reached in between a system some sets of nodes are mostly needed and these nodes are called a quorum. Quorum also has a sub-set of it which is called quorum slice which negotiates with other nodes to enter into an agreement.

When a user believes that quorum slice is trustworthy, then there must be an agreement between the node and the quorum slice in other to work together in harmony.

Quorum intersections

Whenever there is a trust issue and the quorum doesn’t intersect there is a disjoint in the quorum network. Nodes actually have to be independent and must have the same agreement thereby making overall consensus working together. But once there are contradictions between nodes, slice and quorum then it results in quorum intersection and the system may end up with a disjoint quorum.

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There are some key points that are put into consideration when adding the transaction to the blockchain;

1. Freedom of trust: there are ways in which nodes work with their trusted mate and they know the one to choose between bad factors and a good one at any given time.

2. Freedom of participation: any participant have the right to perform in the consensus process and the majority of the people have high voting power.

3. Safety: consensus still gets its right conclusion even though there is a bad node factor.

4. Low latency: transactions are very fast and reliable and their confirmation happens within the twinkle of an eye.

Agreement systems

This system made sure a group of participants reach the same agreement on a certain thing. They are all allowed not to break the trust among themselves. If there is an individual that stands out among those set of people a vote is then conducted and as you know, the majority has high decision-making power.

Timeout

Timeouts mostly occurs when acting nodes find it hard to confirm that a current was unable to see to a COMMIT and this often occurs when there is a network delay or network timeout. The kind of outcome here is not always like at all times but once something like this occurs, it means there must be a timeout for the main time when the network is malfunctioning.

Conclusion

I must say a big thank you to @alphafx for this assignment. The Stellar Consensus Protocol is akin to other consensus protocol. If you have tried sending Stellar coins, you will understand how fast the consensus algorithm allow transactions to be implemented.