We are very fortunate. Perhaps we were born too late to explore this world and too early to explore others, but we are in the right place and at the right time to create new worlds and improve ours. The way we do business, the way we share content, the way we perform payments, all of these things are about to change thanks to blockchain technology. And this will be achieved gradually thanks to many companies or projects, each focused on their piece of the puzzle. TRON is one of those projects, and it is dedicated to the establishment of a truly decentralized Internet and its infrastructure. The creator of TRON is Justin Sun, a millenial from China which appeared in Forbes 30 under 30, is the founder of Peiwo and graduate of Jack Ma’s Hupan University.

Tron’s Story

The story starts with Justin Sun’s graduation thesis titled “The Birth of a Decentralized Internet”. It continues with the creation of a non-profit organization called Tron Foundation by Justin, in Singapore on September 2017. Next, the TRX ICO is performed on the ETH Network, which starts on 7 SEP 2017 (1 TRX = 0.0019 USD). A total of $58M are raised. The next step for Tron is to create their own network. They do so in 2018, and launch the Tron Network at 10 AM on June 25th, helped by the Tron Independent Group (TIG), a community consensus-based group, consisting 27 anonymous, volunteering Genesis Representatives (GR). During the transitioning period, the GR are replaced by other Super Representatives. The Constitutional Phase Begins and development of DApps continually increases.

Tron TRX is one of many efforts seeking to leverage the peer-to-peer nature of modern networks in order to allow content creators and distributors direct access to their consumers. YouTube, iTunes, and other centralized distribution networks have a significant choke hold on the digital content market, creating a barrier for independent content producers seeking distribution channels. — Daniel Hockenberry

Justin Sun — Source: coinwire.com

The Consensus Protocol

A consensus protocol/mechanism is a fault-tolerant mechanism that is used in computer and blockchain systems to achieve the necessary agreement on a single data value or a single state of the network among distributed processes or multi-agent systems. These consensus protocols are at the core of blockchain technology. Blockchains are decentralized ledgers which, by definition, are not controlled by a central authority. Due to the value stored in these ledgers, bad actors have huge economic incentives to try and cause faults. In order to prevent these bad actors from causing faults, a multitude of consensus protocols are used for the approximately 2034 projects currently present on CoinMarketCap.

THE TOP THREE

Each of the top three projects (BTC|ETH|XRP) uses a different type of consensus protocol. Bitcoin uses the Proof of Work (PoW) protocol, Ethereum uses the Proof of Stake (PoS) protocol and Ripple uses the Ripple Protocol Consensus Algorithm (RPCA).

The process of Proof of Work (PoW) is known as mining and as such the nodes on the network are known as “miners”. The “proof of work” comes in the form of an answer to a mathematical problem, one that requires considerable work to arrive at, but is easily verified to be correct once the answer has been reached. PoW was developed by Satoshi Nakamoto as a solution to the Byzantine Generals problem for Bitcoin.

The PoW consensus protocol was the best consensus protocol, when it was the only consensus protocol. PoW fails to deliver on Satoshi’s vision of decentralization due to the possibility of 51% attacks. 51% attacks occur when one entity or a group of entities, gain control of 51% of the network hash-rate. Now all valid transactions can be prevented from occurring, already occurred transactions can be reversed and the same coin can be spent twice. This already happened to Verge, Bitcoin (Gold), and Zen cash, and it will happen on other networks in the future. Besides leading to centralization in the long term, PoW is extremely unscalable, expensive and slow. No need to bring references for my statement above since everyone who’s ever used the Bitcoin network knows exactly what I am talking about.

The Proof of Stake (PoS) concept states that a person can mine or validate block transactions according to how many coins he or she holds. This means that the more Bitcoin or altcoin owned by a miner, the more mining power he or she has. The PoS consensus protocol solves the 51% attack problem and is a lot more scalable compared to PoW protocols. However, since the major stakeholder enjoys extensive control and authority over both technical and economic aspects of the network, the centralization problem is still present.

The third digital currency according to CoinMarketCap, Ripple, uses the Ripple Protocol Consensus Algorithm (RPCA). The RPCA, is applied every few seconds by all nodes, in order to maintain the correctness and agreement of the network. Once consensus is reached, the current ledger is considered “closed” and becomes the last-closed ledger. Assuming that the consensus algorithm is successful, and that there is no fork in the network, the last-closed ledger maintained by all nodes in the network will be identical. Should a user attempt to double-spend funds in two transactions, for example, even if both transactions are confirmed during the consensus process, after the

first transaction is applied, the second will fail, as the funds are no longer available.

The Ripple network used to be a centralized one. In the past, the majority of the network validators, were run by Ripple, the company. For this reason XRP has a bad rep for being centralized. However, the number of XRP validators has increased by 620% in the past year and a half, from 25 in May 2017 to 155 in October 2018. RPCA It is the most scalable, cost efficient and fast consensus protocol on the market right now. However, I strongly believe that the risk for centralization is possible in this model, because of the fact that each server maintains a Unique Node List (UNL) which is a set of other validators that the server queries when determining consensus. The UNL only contains other trusted validators, and that trust is decided by the validator. The community has no say which validator should be trusted and which not.

THE TRON STANDARD

Delegated Proof of Stake

The community doesn’t play a vital role in any of the consensus protocols above, to decide who should be trusted to operate the network. In the PoS protocol, the system automatically decides that the largest stakeholders should run the network. However, this does not mean that they are the most qualified to do so (not just from a technological point of view). As a result, the entire decision process is flawed from the beginning.

The Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS)was invented by Daniel Larimer when he realized that Bitcoin was unsustainable and prone to centralization. The DPoS could be summarized as digital democracy. It works by allowing the community (stakeholders) to actively vote and select the main validators/nodes that run the network. There are only a limited number of main seats for the validators to run the network. These main seats come with certain benefits that encourage competition.

There are many other projects that use DPoS, such as Ark, EOS, Steem or Lisk. Tron however takes the DPoS to a new level of innovation. There are a total of 27 Super Representatives (SR). These SRs are voted in by the entire community. Every 6 hours, the community can recast their votes. This allows stakeholders to reward good SRs and penalize bad SRs.