Clear DefinitionsHashgraph
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Pronunciation
[hash-graf]
Analogy
Imagine a group of people quickly gossiping (sharing event information) with each other. Hashgraph not only tracks who told whom and when (the gossip history, forming a DAG), but also uses this information for everyone to figure out the order of all events (transactions) without formal voting rounds, as if they all saw the entire gossip history and collectively agreed on the sequence. It's like inferring consensus from the flow of information itself.
Definition
A patented distributed ledger technology that uses a gossip protocol to spread information and a virtual voting consensus mechanism based on a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) of events. It aims for high throughput, fairness in transaction ordering, and low latency.
Key Points Intro
Key Points
Uses a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) to represent the history of events (gossip messages).
Employs a 'gossip about gossip' protocol where nodes exchange information about who they've gossiped with and what they've learned.
Achieves consensus through 'virtual voting,' where nodes can determine the consensus order of events by looking at the hashgraph structure without explicit voting messages.
Claims to offer high throughput, low latency, and asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance (aBFT).
Example
Hedera Hashgraph is a public distributed ledger that utilizes hashgraph consensus. It's used for various applications including payments, decentralized identity, and auditable logging.
Technical Deep Dive
In Hashgraph, nodes randomly gossip their transactions and information about past gossip events with other nodes. This creates a DAG where vertices are 'events' (bundles of transactions and hashes of previous events) and edges point from an event to its parent events. The 'gossip about gossip' protocol ensures all nodes eventually receive all events. Consensus on the order of transactions is achieved by nodes independently running a virtual voting algorithm on their local copy of the hashgraph. This algorithm allows nodes to determine which events are 'famous witnesses' and then divide the graph into rounds, establishing a total order of transactions within each round. The consensus is claimed to be aBFT.
Security Warning
Hashgraph is a patented technology, which has implications for its openness and adoption compared to open-source DLTs. While it claims strong security properties like aBFT, the practical decentralization and governance of networks using it (like Hedera) are also important considerations.
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