network-stories/pages/Safety vs Liveness.md

1.9 KiB

title: author: dateCreated: dateUpdated: @today

Topic: Safety vs Liveness

Chat: [Live Discussion]

Tags: [Relevant Tags to Topic/Concept] see Tags

ELI5: 

Consensus protocols provide two guarantees with respect to order and timing:

Safety: As long as the protocol does not have more than some threshold of faulty participants, other participants cannot convince a client to accept an incorrect or invalid message.

Liveness: So long as there is always at least one transaction suitable for inclusion that has not been deemed final by any properly-operating nodes, the set of transactions deemed final by at least one properly-operating node will increase in number. | As long as the protocol does not have more than some threshold of faulty participants, other participants cannot indefinitely delay the acceptance of a correct message.

Overview

Operating Definition:

[Definition here]1

Principles

[What principle(s) are we trying to protect by innovating on this front? The solution that is aligned with the original Ethereum ethos to which Status is preserving ideological alignment with.] see Principles

Implementation

  • Description and Explanation [Technical Why goes here. Systems that are very similar to us or are the current "best-in-class" that we are trying to improve upon for a given factor (define context-relevant network assumptions per phrase, ideally we'll come up with visual sliding bars to show complex relationships between increasing/decreasing factors and how we go from "research" assumptions to "production" engineering) and why?]
  • Key Differences: [Easy low-hanging fruit for marketing or communication that makes our implementation clearly different/better.]
  • Additional Information: [Quickly share unread but potentially valuable resources and comments here to be re-read by someone else who can integrate them.]