We need a worldwide financial network open to anyone, so that new organizations can join and extend financial access to unserved communities. The challenge for such a network is ensuring participants record transactions correctly. With a low barrier to entry, users won’t trust providers to police themselves. With worldwide reach, providers won’t all trust a single entity to operate the network. A compelling alternative is a decentralized system in which participants together ensure integrity by agreeing on the validity of one another’s transactions. Such agreement hinges on a mechanism for worldwide consensus. This paper presents federated Byzantine agreement (FBA), a model suitable for worldwide consensus. In FBA, each participant knows of others it considers important. It waits for the vast majority of those others to agree on any transaction before considering the transaction settled. In turn, those important participants do not agree to the transaction until the participants they consider important agree as well, and so on. Eventually, enough of the network accepts a transaction that it becomes infeasible for an attacker to roll it back. Only then do any participants consider the transaction settled.
The pipeline control process eliminates much of the real time arranging of notary nets. The protocols specify the notary services up front. So, if the cascading consensus is what is needed then write it into the escrow protocol. All the new notary methods are independent of the bearer asset mechanism, no special coin needed, no special trading sites, just upload your new protocol, escrow router does the rest.
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