Mastering Blockchain - Second Edition

Types of consensus mechanisms

All consensus mechanisms are developed to deal with faults in a distributed system and to allow distributed systems to reach a final state of agreement. There are two general categories of consensus mechanisms. These categories deal with all types of faults (fail stop type or arbitrary). These common types of consensus mechanisms are as follows:

• Traditional Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT)-based: With no compute-intensive operations, such as partial hash inversion (as in Bitcoin PoW), this method relies on a simple scheme of nodes that are publisher-signed messages. Eventually, when a certain number of messages are received, then an agreement is reached.
• Leader election-based consensus mechanisms: This arrangement ...