Its already old news that the Cardano Network has upgraded to the Shelley protocol. With that upgrade came a lot of new features chief among them was the Proof of Stake feature which borders a lot on Concensus. But what exactly is Concensus and how is it achieved in the Cardano Network. That and more is what we will be looking at here.
Consensus in its most basic form I'll say is the process by which a majority agreement is attained by all or most of those who have a stake in the running of a Blockchain. Agreement has to be made by the stakeholders on basic questions like; which blocks to produce, which chain to adopt, and to determine the single state of the network. In Cardano, they have been able to achieve and attain a state of Concensus through the use of their one of a kind proof-of-stake consensus protocol Ouroboros. Ouroboros has in the time since it's usage shown that it can guarantee as well as, and in an even better way than the Proof-of-work protocol. What is Ouroboros though, and how does it help achieve Concensus, let's take a quick look at that.
Ouroboros is a decentralized ledger protocol just like any other, but what makes the protocol special to me is the effective combination of these two factors.
Ouroboros brings with it a Trustlessness that for me is unrivalled on other protocols. The procedure for becoming a part of the protocol execution is so Trustless that it does not require the availability of any resources to be shared such as a recent checkpoint or a common clock. To participate, you only need the public genesis block of the chain, and access to the network. This is so unlike a lot of other networks where resources need to be shared, and there is always the risk of these resources being siphoned by certain unscrupulous participants for personal gains. Ouroboros truly offers the Trustlessness that Blockchain gives to us.
The second and final factor that makes the Ouroboros protocol special to me is that it uses Staking as the basic way to factor in the participants’ pull in the system. This makes Ouroboros almost not susceptible to attacks, while also making the protocol less cumbersome than a Proof-of-work protocol. This for me is one major factor why Ouroboros draws my attention more than the proof-of-work protocols, it does not require large amounts of energy and human resources to maintain the network. And those who stake also get the chance to earn passive rewards for doing their bit to the growth and smooth functioning of the network.
Blockchain is all about Concensus, and Cardano through the Ouroboros protocol have been able to do this rather effortlessly. They have truly created something great and beautiful, and it's a joy to be a part of it.