A New Approach to Consensus: Swirlds HashGraph
Leemon Baird,
Sammantics,
Aug 06, 2016
Encrypted currency like bitcoin works because everyone agrees that a transaction has taken place. In the case of the blockchaain, everyone agrees because the record of the transaction can't be changed; it's encrypted and stored in the block. But does everyone need to agree for us to be able to say everyone agrees? Probably not; a good interconnected subset of users will do. And that's the idea behind the mechanism of the blockgraph, the system employed by Swirlds as an alternative to the blockchain. Now, will this eventually replace blockchain? It's too soon to tell, but it does open the door to the idea that more distributed (and hence, faster and less susceptible to failure) mechanisms can be deployed. But a lot depends on whether the algorithms hold up and whether the technology can be practically implemented. Here's the white paper (25 page PDF) describing the hashgraph, which is some heavy reading. Here are the developer resources and SDK.
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