
Blockchain-beater? A new approach to consensus - EGreg
http://sammantics.com/blog/2016/7/27/hashgraph-consensus
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EGreg
This part makes me think that, after consensus is reached for the first X
transactions, that's effectively like a Ripple blockchain. Except with no
central validators:

 _Imagine a cryptocurrency, where each transaction is a statement "transfer X
coins from wallet Y to wallet Z". At some point, the community will reach a
consensus on the exact ordering of the first 100 transactions. At that time,
each member of the community can calculate exactly how many coins are in each
wallet after processing those 100 transactions (in the consensus order),
before processing transaction number 101. They will therefore agree on the
"state", which is the list of amounts of coins in all the non-empty wallets.
Each of them digitally signs that state. They gossip their signatures. So then
each member will end up having a copy of the state along with the signatures
from most of the community. This combination of the state and list of
signatures is something that mathematically proves exactly how much money
everyone had after transaction 100. It proves it in a way that is
transferrable: a member could show this to a court of law, to prove that Alice
had 10 coins after transaction 100 and before transaction 101. _

