Hashgraph
Blockchain is a remarkable feat of technology, but there are certain limitations even with this immutable technology. Blockchain being a decentralized and distributed ledger that uses complex cryptography to conceal all and each of the entity block’s identity; with a closed chain of peer to peer network that brings together distributed time-stamping. Blockchain is an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions, it can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value. Data that are on a blockchain exists as shared and is continually reconciled or updated. This ensures the records or data it holds are identical across all nodes on the network and not stored in any individual location. As such, the blockchain cannot be controlled by any single entity and it has no single point of failure.
Hashgraph edges forward blockchain by supporting a superior data structure capable of solving many of the problems that the Blockchain community has been struggling with for some time like, consensus mechanism.
Highlights
Speedy
Hashgraph is insanely fast compared to blockchain, as it uses the gossip protocol to spread messages to the network and also performs some optimization of the gossiped messages to reduce the communication overhead. The gossip-about-gossip also yields a consensus protocol.
Balanced
Hashgraph provides balance of fairness through consensus time stamping. This means that if one transaction reaches two-thirds of the network ahead of other transactions, it is considered to be the first. It is a relatively fair system, as two-thirds of the network as witnesses and it is difficult for a majority of them to make unfair decisions.
Secure
Hashgraph is an asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT), but it isn’t deterministic. In asynchronous systems, deterministic consensus protocols are impossible even in the simple case of only one faulty node. A consensus protocol can be either non-deterministic asynchronous or deterministic non-completely asynchronous in the Byzantine setting.
Both Blockchain and Hashgraph are similar in the way they propagate information in a network and the reliance on the gossip protocol. What this means that a node in the network conveys information regarding transactions to its neighbours, sending the hash codes associated with transactions to all nodes in the network. From that point of time it becomes a race between the nodes to solve the complex mathematical problem. The winning node then pockets a share of the currency.
This is the proof-of-work PoW. After the winner communicates to its neighbours about its success, the other nodes have to cease processing the hash for that transaction, and move on to the next. Before a block is added to the chain, the veracity of the winning node’s claim has to be checked to avoid the insertion of fraud blocks and duplicates.