I am really interested in the Modified Federated Byzantine Agreements (mFBA) spoken about in the whitepaper that allow for the Governance system to interact with the Proof of Work System.
The section is here:
b. Federate Byzantine Agreement Consensus Algorithm 14
Bitcoin’s consensus mechanism and the traditional Byzantine agreement based protocols
require a unanimous agreement by all participants of the network. However, the federated
Byzantine agreement(FBA) does not require an unanimous agreement by all participants and
additionally each node can choose which nodes to trust. This results in faster transactions
without losing integrity of the financial network and allowing for organic growth of the network.
FBA implemented this type of non-unanimous consensus mechanism by grouping nodes into
teams (also known as a Quorums). When a transaction is made, the information is sent to all
those in the group. Rather than waiting for the whole network to agree on the state of the
data, if a node hears the same message from a sufficient number of trusted nodes, the node
assumes the information is correct. The overlapping of nodes, or loose federation of nodes,
results in different nodes that have different sets of teams to agree on the same transactions.
This leads to a system-wide consensus, without requiring unanimous agreement for each
transaction block.
In situations where nodes are in disagreement over a fraudulent transaction, there is a ballot
system embedded into the system to overcome such issues. Further technical details
regarding FBA can be found in Stellar’s consensus protocol paper.
c. How is the modified federated Byzantine agreement(mFBA) algorithm different?
In addition to FBA, the BOScoin consensus protocol also applies a Proof of Stake feature for
the maintenance of the governance system. Users can freeze coins in units of 10,000 BOS
within a node and forgo liquidity in return for newly issued BOScoin(similar to interest on
savings) based on the total number of frozen coin in the node. The frozen coins in the node
then act as both an economic incentive to operate a node as well as collateral for the security
and integrity of the information held in the node’s blockchain. According to the pre-set rules, if
the node is discovered to have forged the blockchain on the node, the frozen coins are
forfeited to the Commons Budget.
There are some really interesting implications to this system. For me, one of the the most intriguing aspects is the game theory aspect of having users freeze funds inside of nodes then basing the freezing reward off of the node's own frozen funds. I think this will lead to small 'lending' groups of people who work together with nodes to take care of the system. With the current governance chaos of Bitcoin, it will be interesting to see what happens when the system and the users are creating confederations. It really does seem like multi-level consensus.
Does anyone here have any experience working with the Byzantine Tolerance systems or have any insights about the BOScoin solution? I know they have been used in traditional data-basing and P2P systems in the past and I am amped to see how they perform as more proof of stake systems enter the wild.