The article explores the foundational concepts of blockchain technology, particularly emphasizing the distinction between transaction order finality and state value finality. By analyzing transactions as state transformation functions within a virtual machine, it highlights essential design choices necessary for effective blockchain implementation. The authors discuss potential catastrophic failures, such as software exploits, and propose checkpoint finality as a governance strategy to maintain security. The findings reinforce that consensus on transaction order is vital for establishing ground truth in blockchain systems, with other components serving as optimizations.
Blockchains combine a distributed append-only log with a virtual machine to define how log entries are interpreted, separating transaction order from state value finality.
Consensus on transaction order serves as ground truth, and other aspects such as computing values or managing failures are optimizations of this foundational principle.
Collection
[
|
...
]