Consensus Models in Public and Consortium Blockchain: Tradeoff Analysis
Authors: Lamine SANO & Othman Darwish Abstract In distributed systems, with multiple computing nodes, consensus is a fundamental concept that aims to achieving system reliability, with the fact that some nodes may fail, malfunction or provide malicious information. This conflict in the provided information, requires a mechanism where all nodes agree on some state; this process is called consensus. The problem was first formulated by Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak and Marshall Pease in their 1982 paper, "The Byzantine Generals Problem," [1] and proved then to be unsolvable. Since then, different algorithms were designed and developed to try and solve this problem under various assumptions. The advent of Bitcoin, and its underlying innovating blockchain technology provided a practical and radical mechanism to solve this problem and make it possible to transfer information in an entirely decentralized and trustless environment. This paper, will briefly explore th