Sunday, April 29, 2018

CAP theorem and blockchain

It seems that the CAP theorem is violated in the blockchain, and especially in the most successful implementation: Bitcoin, but this is not the case. In blockchains, consistency is temporarily sacrificed in favour of availability and partition tolerance. In this scenario, Consistency (C) on the blockchain is not achieved simultaneously with Partition tolerance (P) and Availability (A), but it is achieved over time. This is called eventual consistency, where consistency is achieved as a result of validation from multiple nodes over time. For this purpose, the concept of mining was introduced in Bitcoin; this is a process that facilitates the achievement of consensus by using a consensus algorithm called Proof of Work (PoW). At a higher level, mining can be defined as a process that is used to add more blocks to the blockchain.

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