Exploring Blockchain (Part 2): What Issues Can Consensus Mechanisms Solve?
🌈🔺In this article, we will delve into the concepts of DAG and consensus mechanisms in blockchain technology, exploring the problems they can solve and introducing the innovative MeerDAG protocol.
Consensus Mechanism
What is a consensus mechanism?
🌐Consensus occurs when multiple individuals agree on a specific issue.
In daily life, practical examples of consensus mechanisms include a company’s decision-making process involving collective discussions among shareholders to reach a unanimous agreement, or negotiations between parties when signing a contract. The goal of this process is to achieve consensus.
In a blockchain system, each node’s main task is to ensure its ledger consistency with other nodes. In traditional centralized scenarios, this is almost not a problem due to the existence of a central server (i.e. the master database); subordinate databases only need consistency with the master.
However, decentralized management lacks central authority, necessitating an algorithm for nodes to achieve consensus on ledger states. This is the consensus mechanism.
A consensus mechanism is a process where specific nodes vote to quickly validate and confirm transactions. For a transaction, if several unrelated nodes reach a consensus, we can consider the entire network to have reached consensus on that transaction.
Although consensus and consistency are considered to be approximately equivalent in many application scenarios, there are subtle differences in their meanings:
💫Consensus research focuses on the process and algorithms for distributed nodes to reach agreement, while consistency research emphasizes the stable state eventually reached in the consensus process.
In addition, traditional distributed consistency research typically does not consider Byzantine fault tolerance, assuming the absence of malicious tampering and forging of data by Byzantine nodes. After all, in a completely open and transparent blockchain network, it cannot be guaranteed that all nodes will act honestly.
What Issues Can Consensus Mechanisms Solve?
The consensus mechanism addresses the trust issue in distributed systems, ensuring data consistency and security among nodes. In traditional distributed systems, the lack of a trust mechanism among nodes makes them vulnerable to attacks and tampering by malicious nodes, leading to system crashes or data manipulation.
In addition, before the emergence of blockchain encryption technology, encrypted digital currencies, like other assets, are infinitely replicable. In the absence of a centralized media agency, people can not confirm whether digital cash has been spent.
✨The consensus mechanism effectively solves two core problems: the double-spending problem (a sum of money is spent twice) and the Byzantine Generals problem (a malicious node tampering with data).
What are some consensus mechanisms?
The PoW consensus mechanism used by Bitcoin is considered the most secure and decentralized approach. However, as the demand for blockchain grows, the performance of this consensus gradually lags.
Therefore, various consensus mechanisms such as PoS, DPoS, PoA, etc., have emerged to overcome some of the shortcomings in the Bitcoin network, aiming for improved performance and efficiency.
🦀The design of new consensus mechanisms often sacrifices decentralization and security to some extent, with the goal of improving performance. We can categorize current network forms from two perspectives: security and performance:
Low security, high performance: Typically categorized as traditional centralized networks, characterized by lower security and requiring real-time maintenance.
Moderate security, moderate performance: Maintains a balance with moderate levels of both security and performance.
High security, low performance: Represented by Bitcoin, emphasizes high security but tends to have lower performance.
Qitmeer Network, utilizing DAG technology, falls into the second category on a broad scale. However, it’s worth noting that it may excel in security compared to other networks, presenting an advantage of DAG technology in this aspect.
DAG consensus mechanism
In the previous text, we mentioned that Bitcoin connects two ledgers together through the relationship between the front and back ledgers, forming the “chain” in the “blockchain”. The DAG as a whole is a connected network diagram without any rules.
BTC’s blockchain adopts a single-chain structure that cannot concurrently package blocks. In contrast, DAG is a topological structure that, while maintaining a constant block packaging time, can simultaneously package multiple blocks, thereby increasing the transaction throughput capacity of the blockchain by a factor of N compared to the single-chain scenario.
🌟In other blockchain networks, a transaction might need to wait until the next block is packaged before being introduced to the network, whereas DAG technology allows transactions to be mapped to the network simultaneously.
Therefore, compared to Bitcoin, DAG is no longer constrained by a single chain structure. It can scale across the entire network, handling multiple different transactions simultaneously and introducing different transactions without a fixed time pattern. This significantly improves the efficiency of transaction processing in DAG, making it one of the advantages of the Bitcoin network.
This approach not only ensures the confirmation of each new transaction but also achieves the indirect verification of all transactions. Each transaction initiator does not need to pay additional costs for the confirmation of their own transaction because the initiator consumes their computational power when validating other transactions.
MeerDAG consensus mechanism
Qitmeer Network is based on DAG consensus and innovatively implements the MeerDAG hybrid consensus mechanism.
This hybrid consensus mechanism achieves an ideal balance in terms of security, openness, fairness, and scalability, not only enhancing the flexibility of the network, but also realizing the characteristics of free entry and exit of the network, thus achieving a perfectly combined blockchain measurement.
🪐In the early days of the network, real computing power environment testing was introduced. The team ensured the basic requirements of security, decentralization, and fairness by continuously iterating the PoW algorithm and improving its operating efficiency. In this process, TPS performance was maximally released, proposing a unique and feasible solution for high-performance blockchain networks.
Qitmeer Team’s innovative MeerDAG protocol will become the prototype of the new generation of BlockDAG technology. This protocol, driven by MeerEVM at Layer 2, lays a solid foundation for building rich blockchain applications.
The innovation of MeerDAG is not only reflected in the optimization of blockchain performance, but also in its active promotion of the overall ecosystem, injecting new vitality into the continuous evolution of blockchain technology.
Its collaborative model and unique solutions have provided feasibility for the implementation of high-performance blockchains, achieving milestone achievements in advancing blockchain technology. In the future, Qitmeer Network is expected to become a leader in the blockchain field, leading the industry towards a more brilliant tomorrow.
