Distributed Consensus

What Is Distributed Consensus?

A Distributed Consensus is when a collective agreement is established among network nodes. Distributed consensus is required for a network or system to function decentralized. It is simple to get an agreement involving, say, two parties (Jane invites Ron to her house; Ron agrees.) 

However, as the number of parties (or nodes on a network) grows, achieving consensus becomes increasingly challenging. To work together toward a mutual goal, all nodes in a network must agree on a "single source of truth" — i-e, they must be confident that the information they are receiving is correct even if several other nodes on the network fail.

Diving Deeper Into the Concept of a Distributed Consensus

Each node in the network (or, for example, every participant in the Bitcoin blockchain) must have a similar copy of the ledger, and everyone must agree that the variant of the ledger stored by each node is correct. 

Blockchain projects employ distributed consensus techniques to do this. For example, consensus and coordination on the Bitcoin blockchain are achieved by Proof-of-Work, as proposed and implemented by Satoshi Nakamoto. Proof-of-Stake and Delegated Proof-of-Stake are two other consensus procedures. 

However, the underlying features of most distributed consensus systems are the same. First, they are predicated on a stake – a store of value put up by a proposer, such as dollars or computing capacity. They also include a validation incentive (payment for mining a new block), typically in the form of a coin unique to the blockchain in question. 

They operate on transparency, meaning that other users must be able to tell if a validator or proposer intends to cheat or scam the system. Proof-of-Work is the cornerstone for blockchain-based consensus and the Bitcoin blockchain, over which new blocks are mined. Other blockchain projects, meanwhile, are employing novel consensus processes.