New Explainer Site Launched!

Do you under what one of the key innovations of the Solana blockchain is? It is their Proof of History mechanism that differentiates it from the slower consensus mechanisms of other blockchains.

Just use a Time Clock right? Problem solved.

Its pretty simple right? Use a virtual clock to syncronise validator nodes so they can quickly verify blocks are coming in at the same time. Just stick atomic clocks in Satellites, Telco towers and Google datacentres and problem solved right? Well, it’s not that simple.

The Solana Proof of History explainer site explains in easy terminology, how effects like network delays, relativity and time dilation can produce inaccuracies in time sync across a global network.

Why is Solana Proof of History so important?

You need syncronisation across a financial De-Fi blockchain network in order to ensure issues like double-spend do not occur. Distributed ledger technologies ensure you can’t spend the same money twice, however there is massive risk when outsourcing to external third party atomic clock providers. This is where Solana tech has the problem sorted, with their Proof of History virtual clock.

Solana’s blockchain has super accurate time stamps to ensure every transaction is accurate recorded in it’s blockchain history. On the flip side, other DLT’s like Bitcoin user a SHA-256 brute force search, limiting their blockchain to 7 transactions per second (TPS). Solana’s Proof of History mechanism enables up to 65k in MainNet Beta.

The new Solana Proof of History explainer site explains how this works using sand through an hourglass… Sorry couldn’t help myself.

If you still don’t get it, don’t worry. Let’s try another way, watch this YouTube video below…

Watch this POH Explainer Video

Want to Technically Deep Dive on Proof of History?

Jump over to the official Solana Medium Blog and read up from Anatoly himself:

What if you could simply trust the timestamp that is encoded into the message? An enormous wealth of distributed systems optimizations would suddenly be at your disposal. E.g. “Synchronized clocks are interesting because they can be used to improve the performance of distributed algorithms. They make it possible to replace communication with local computation.”

— Liskov, B. Practical uses of synchronized clocks in distributed systems In our case this means a high throughput, high performance blockchain

Dont forget to check out the ProofOfHistory.co explainer site out now!

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