🖥️The Tangle
A Tangle is a data structure replicated across a network of computers (also known as "nodes") that contains all the information needed to track ownership of tokens. It forms a directed acyclic graph of blocks (block DAG), where each newer block is attached to multiple older blocks.
Speed Force nodes currently reach consensus on the state of the ledger with the help of milestone blocks (also known as "milestones"). Milestones are published by a central node called a Coordinator. The Coordinator represents an interim solution and will be phased out as part of Speed Force's decentralization efforts.
The Tangle Versus Blockchains
While the Tangle and blockchains have the same function of maintaining their ledger state, the Tangle overcomes the difficulties blockchains face. The Tangle naturally succeeds the blockchain as its next evolutionary step as it offers features suited to establish more efficient and scalable distributed ledger solutions.
Blockchains
A blockchain consists of a growing list of records also called blocks that are linked together using cryptography. Transactions can only become part of the ledger if they are included in a newly issued block. In the case that not all new transactions fit into one block, some of them have to be postponed to the next block or later. Also, typically, block producers favor to include transactions from users willing to pay higher fees. Accelerating block creation and/or increasing block sizes doesn't solve the issues, as it is well known that this would compromise safety. In other words, to guarantee the security of the system, the throughput of the system must be artificially suppressed so that each block propagates fully before the next block is created.
The fact that only one block producer can advance the ledger state does not only create a bottleneck with well-known performance limitations, but also causes other block candidates that do not win the race to be discarded - and in the case of SF systems, all the effort and electricity put into their calculation might be wasted.
Blockchains further face several problems with the intermediary miners or validators e.g. mining races, centralisation, miner extractable value, and negative externalities.
The Tangle
The Tangle describes a novel leaderless, probabilistic consensus protocol that enables parallel validation of transactions without requiring total ordering. It also enables the elimination of intermediary miners and validators. The parallelization, the absence of intermediaries, the capability to work in an asynchronous setting and the leaderless approach offers a highly performant consensus and ledger solution.
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