from Hacker News

Show HN: We found a simpler/faster (BFT) consensus protocol

by Vervious on 4/14/23, 3:41 PM with 0 comments

Hi HN --- if you're of the engineering or distributed systems bent, and want to learn (at a more technical level) how the consensus protocols that power Proof-of-Stake blockchains work, my advisor and I just wrote a new paper that might be of interest to you.

The protocol is called "Simplex Consensus". It's super fast and should be easier to understand than everything else out there (i.e. easier than Paxos/PBFT/Algorand/Hotstuff/Tendermint/Ethereum/etc)

I guess another difference from Paxos and Raft (aside from being potentially easier to intuit) is that it tolerates malicious faults, instead of just crash faults.

If this interests you please give it a read! The paper is at https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/463 and I also just finished writing a post at https://simplex.blog. I hope you find it useful; it'd be cool to make consensus accessible to a wider audience. (Feedback appreciated!)