Hi,
I am reading an article on the new consensus version Alpenglow Alpenglow: Solana's Great Consensus Rewrite. It is mentioned that there is an issue with the old consensus described in this article https://tik-db.ee.ethz.ch/file/9d40dad802dd12d9ba1f1b7c1759920c/. Since then has there been any protocol improvements to mitigate this issue (for example one issue mentioned was if a malicious leader sends 3 different versions of the current block to 3 groups of validators of roughly equal size, then the protocol will come to a halt). Specifically how does Alpenglow tackle this type of problems?
Thanks in advance.
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Hi @anhdungle
Sorry for a late reply lol ![]()
Alpenglow considers that many different blocks in one slot might be proposed by a malicious validator. Alpenglow introduces this notion of a ‘skip’ vote and in most scenarios such a slot would be simply omitted. In some scenarios if many nodes see one of the blocks first it could also be voted on and finalized eventually. Point is, Alpenglow considers all these possiblities and guarantees that we’ll skip the slot or agree on exactly one block.
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