SoK: Consensus in the Age of Blockchains

  1. https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/02/12/sok-consensus-in-the-age-of-blockchains/
  2. https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.03936

To big of scope for me to parse, all I know about pre Bitcoin consensus algorithm is they had a hard 33% limit and run on different axoims entirely, and knowing that probably puts me above average, but that’s not enough for me to make heads or tails of what your trying to say dropping a table with a dozen examples I know nothing about with jargon that may be either out of date or applies to the old axoims (I wouldn’t know the difference)

I feel like for tables to be useful I need to know let’s say half of the data intutively so I can visualize a complex space meaningfully filling in gaps or seeing features in prospectives I may of missed, not dropping a 16th dimension space into my mind as that isn’t a thing, Im not even close to that in this case and I doubt others are.

Simplify simplify simplify.

The blockchain gained traction in 2008 as the technology underlying bitcoin, but it is now used in a wide range of applications and has created a global market worth more than $150 billion as of 2017. The ability to operate in a decentralized setting without relying on a trusted third party distinguishes blockchains from traditional distributed databases. As a result, their primary technical component is consensus: how to reach an agreement among a group of nodes. This has already been extensively researched in the distributed systems community for closed systems, but its application to open blockchains has revitalized the field and resulted in a slew of new designs.
The inherent complexity of consensus protocols, also as their rapid and dramatic evolution, makes contextualizing the planning landscape difficult. We address this issue by conducting a systematic and in-depth examination of blockchain consensus protocols. Following a discussion of key themes in classical consensus protocols, we describe: first, protocols based on proof-of-work (PoW), second, protocols based on proof-of-X (PoX), We create a framework to evaluate their performance, security, and design properties, and we use it to systematize key themes in the protocols described above. This evaluation identifies research gaps and challenges for the community to consider in future research endeavors.