In a previous post I discussed the various Consensus Methods - PoW, PoS, Tangle & Tempo. Since then I’ve covered a few topics on the most well known of the consensus methods (PoW and PoS). Today, I want to discuss, what I believe is, the most important of the Consensus Methods for us to grasp: Tempo. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not claiming that Tempo is “better” than the rest. “Better” is subjective. However, I do believe Tempo is by far the most groundbreaking of the Consensus Methods. Tempo tackles the current issues that plague the DLT/Blockchain world – namely scalability & mass adoption. And it does so effectively. As such, from an enthusiast perspective, Radix’s Tempo deserves our keen attention.

In this post, I want to start with the most important element of Tempo:

The Logical Clocks.

Don’t worry – it’s not as intimidating as it sounds. In fact, we’re going to keep this as simple as possible 🙂

Ordering Of Events – PoW, PoS and Tempo

Far too often people misunderstand the “goal” of a Consensus Method. Most people believe that consensus methods exist to “validate” transactions. But in truth, the focus of a Consensus Method is coming to an agreement on a set of events. And most importantly to:

​​​​​​Come to an agreement on the ordering of events!

In distributed systems, the ordering of events (like transactions) can be difficult. You cannot simply attach a timestamp to an event. Due issues like network latency, each system may witness an event at a different time. So how are the systems to agree on the different timestamps? How are they to come to consensus on the ordering of events?

Bitcoin’s Proof Of Work uses The Cryptographic Puzzle as it’s core solution to determine the ordering of events.​

Ethereum’s Proof Of Stake uses Random Sampling to determine the ordering of events.

And finally, Radix’s Tempo uses Logical Clocks to achieve ordering of events.

Logical Clocks – The Heart Of Tempo