January 2019
Beginner to intermediate
372 pages
11h 17m
English
Content preview from Foundations of Blockchain
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Filecoin consensus
The consensus algorithm in Bitcoin doesn't really contribute to anything other than achieving consensus about the global blockchain state.
The difficulty involved in Bitcoin mining makes it really expensive for a node to take part in the mining process. Filecoin proposes a useful work consensus mechanism that ensures that the work done by the miners to achieve consensus is useful.
Filecoin's useful consensus protocol elects a miner to create a block, and the probability of a miner being selected is proportional to its currently used storage relative to the rest of the network. Thus, this consensus protocol ensures that the amount of storage provided is also used as proof of computation.