🚀 What is a Consensus Algorithm?
In blockchain, a consensus algorithm is a mechanism that ensures all nodes in the network agree on the current state of the distributed ledger. This is essential because there is no central authority—the nodes must work together to validate and agree on new transactions and blocks.
🧠 Why Developers Should Care
As a developer, understanding consensus mechanisms helps you:
- Choose the right blockchain for your application.
- Optimize performance for specific use cases.
- Design decentralized apps (dApps) with the right trade-offs in mind.
📌 Comparison Summary
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👨💻 Dev Notes
- When building smart contracts, consensus type determines finality guarantees.
- In permissioned systems (e.g., Hyperledger), PBFT or Raft is a better fit than PoW or PoS.
- For real-time applications, finality and latency are critical, so avoid probabilistic methods like PoW.
📚 References
Top comments (1)
One thing I keep running into when building in Web3 is that most L1s still struggle when you try to run heavy workloads (like AI) fully on-chain. You either get hit with latency, or you end up having to use off-chain servers, which kind of defeats the whole point of decentralization.
That’s actually what we’re trying to solve at 'Haveto', a sharded Layer-1 that can handle AI directly on-chain, sub-500ms latency, and works with any programming language.
Curious if anyone else here has run into similar bottlenecks when pushing performance limits?