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Paxos is a fault tolerant distributed consensus algorithm. Are there any blockchain frameworks which follows paxos algorithm for adding blocks to the blockchain.

Satya Narayana
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Blockchain's consensus algorithms are used to keep malicious nodes from causing harm to the chain, it is a paranoid approach assuming everyone is malicious. These algorithms fall under the Byzantine fault tolerance scope. On the other hand, Paxos in distributed computing is more trusting; when a master node goes down, the others will vote a new master node. A malicious node, or set of nodes, during this process could keep jumping in corrupting the election essentially halting the process. And if the malicious nodes become the master... then what?

There does exist a hybrid, but for the scale of a Blockchain, it could not keep up.

TLDR; None that I know of, and above is the reason.

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Paxos (and Raft) is designed to be used as consensus algorithm in a more trusted environment where we expect nodes to not go rouge or in short it's not Byzantine fault-tolerant; Paxos in only partition-tolerant. Most of the blockchain implementations (like cryptocurrencies) run publicly (in a non-trusted environment) to bring consensus among all participating nodes. Achieving consensus in a public environment is a completely different and difficult problem.

In a public environment, nodes join and leave the network at their will. Also, hackers can exploit and manipulate the consensus by spanning multiple virtual nodes and corrupting the current state.

So Paxos can't be used to achieve consensus in blockchain.

rai.skumar
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