GP007: Hybrid Consensus

Ah, okay

Currently, the pBFT commit rule requires more than 2/3 of the committee members to agree on a proposed block. This rule will be extended with a second condition (stake-weighted voting). In addition to the first condition, the second condition requires that more than 2/3 of the stake held by the committe must agree on the same block.

You introduce a second condition of consensus which is actually a very nice idea. In regards of:

Not quite - votes of the SSNs are weighted by stake, not by number, so more than 2/3 of the staked ZIL(that is prepared to vote - but we intend to make that virtually all the staked ZIL ASAP) needs to vote yes for a block to pass.

Requiring virtuall all the staked ZIL to vote on a proposed block enables an attack vector to DDoS the blockchain and halt all processing of the transactions by just voting against each next block. PoS does not work without penalties. Even 1/3(Top 2 nodes) of the stake can collude and stop the blockchain just for fun because there is virtually no penalty. Or think of more probable case when both nodes are hosted in the same DC and it goes down for couple hours — the blockchain would not be able to proceed.

I suggest to add penalties for Staking nodes. Otherwise there is a temination state of the blockchain where blocks can’t be processed at all and there is no way to get out of it — no way to kick out malicious node from the consensus.

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