Algorand

Use byzantine consensus/agreements in block chains

  • Replace the Proof-of-works consensus protocols in Bitcoin
  • Pros
    • higher throughput
    • no forks
    • no mining
  • Cons
    • liveness
      • malicious
      • concurrent proposals
    • membership management
      • join/leave
      • Sybil attacks

Sortition based on Verifiable Random Function (VRF)

  • Sortition:
    • proposer
    • committee
  • given public/private key pair (pk, sk), VRF(sk, seed) generates a hash and a proof
    • use the hash to deterministically decide whether the user is a proposer or a committee member
    • seed is in the previous block

BA agreements

  • Vote and CountVote
    • over threshold in the first round: final consensus
    • else: tentative consensus
      • fork: could achieve tentative consensus on two blocks, why? (network asynchrony)

Compare to Stellar

  • a node in Stellar selects a number of servers it trusts as the consensus group, compared to VRF used in Algorand
  • BA in Stellar is ballot-based, a node first tries to find out what value is potentially chosen before