Once voting has been completed, the top 100 Witnesses by vote are included in the next day’s block creation work. Each elected witness is given equal responsibility based upon their votes and not on their stake in the system. Blocks are handed out randomly and each witness can refuse to include any given transaction in a block. If a block or transaction is rejected by the witness, then the next block will take twice as long to confirm, thus discouraging untrustworthy behaviour.

After the day is complete, voting begins again for the top 100 Witnesses and any that performed poorly or simply did the wrong thing will be voted out. This ensures that it is beneficial for a Witness to protect the integrity of the blockchain, because they will want to stay in as a Witness. The larger the community grows, the more competition there is for the top 100 spots, making it more important that a Witness perform well.

Dan Larimer stated that the system runs on reputation. It is very difficult to build up a strong reputation, but very easy to lose one.

Since the system also has continual competition, the fees which are set by the community and Witnesses are kept low. DPoS will even run on just the fees charged in transactions and not need any new coins to be produced like Bitcoin does. This will help keep inflation in check and maintain the value of the coin.

If the cost to run the system gets too high, then the users can reduce the cost by choosing to use less than 100 Witnesses to run the blockchain, however, this reduces the decentralized aspect. If the cost is low, then they can increase the number of used Witnesses and thus increase the network’s level of decentralization.

Another major benefit of this consensus is the speed in which it can process transactions. Bitcoin confirms a new block every 10 minutes and it takes 6 confirmations for a block to be added to the blockchain, while DPoS creates a block every 10 seconds, over 360 times faster. That difference is like that of a car going 1Km/h racing one going 360Km/h… the former is so clearly outmatched.

As you can see, the consensus mechanism chosen by aelf has very specific benefits that finally provide answers to some of the largest problems currently plaguing Bitcoin. In a nutshell, aelf’s use of DPoS solves the issues of slow transaction speed, high fees, poor scalability and risk of centralization all in one chain — and this is just on top of the real world problems they are already solving with the aelf Multi-chain network. For more information on the aelf Project, see this article.