The Stellar Consensus Protocol | David Mazières | Talks at Google

David Mazières introduces Federated Byzantine Agreement and explains how the Stellar Consensus Protocol achieves decentralized internet-level consensus.

David Mazières: "The Stellar Consensus Protocol: A Federated Model for Internet-level Consensus" This talk presents federated Byzantine agreement (FBA), a generalization of the standard Byzantine agreement problem. Unlike traditional Byzantine agreement--which presupposes unanimous agreement on system membership--the FBA model grants organizations individual control over whom to trust, allowing membership to grow organically out of pairwise relationships between participants. Compared to proof-of-work and proof-of-stake, two other decentralized alternatives to Byzantine agreement, FBA enables far more efficient constructions with greater margins of computational security. The talk further presents the Stellar consensus protocol (SCP), the first FBA protocol. SCP forms the backbone of the Stellar payment network, where it secures financial transactions. Other potential applications include secure timestamping and strengthening certificate transparency.