
PARSEC: A Paradigm Shift for Asynchronous and Permissionless Consensus - frabrunelle
https://medium.com/safenetwork/parsec-a-paradigm-shift-for-asynchronous-and-permissionless-consensus-e312d721f9d8
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dana123
Highly Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance

The concept of Byzantine Fault Tolerance is a crucial one. It means that it is
mathematically guaranteed that all parts of the Network will come to the same
agreement at a certain point in time. Exactly what PARSEC achieves.

This is very different to any blockchain-based consensus mechanism. With
blockchains, the probability that the consensus cannot be reversed increases
with every additional block that is added to the blockchain — but crucially,
it never reaches 100% certainty. Put simply, this is down to the way in which
blocks are added in blockchain technology and not something that will change
in the future. With PARSEC, consensus is mathematically guaranteed as certain
(as well as having a throughput that dwarves blockchain tech). And this is a
huge thing.

What’s more, PARSEC is highly asynchronous. This means that there is no
trusted setup nor any synchronous steps involved, as might be required in
common coin implementations or threshold signature schemes. In other words,
any consensus mechanism has to be able to work perfectly, even when different
events on the Network are reaching nodes at wildly different times and
allowing for the fact that nodes may suffer technical issues around the world
or the Network could be attacked.

