Steve Jobs’s “reality distortion field” was a personal refusal to accept limitations that stood in the way of his ideas, to convince himself that any difficulty was surmountable. This “field” was so strong that he was able to convince others that they, too, could achieve the impossible. It was an internal reality so powerful it also became an external reality. Whatever you may say about Jobs, he was a master mind hacker.
Polkadot uses a consensus model based on the description above, a hybrid model that separates block production from finality on those blocks. Our goals are for the block production layer to be fast and probabilistically safe. The finality gadget should be asynchronously safe, should provide accountable safety, and should be able to finalize many blocks at once. We have invented GRANDPA (GHOST-based Recursive Ancestor Deriving Prefix Agreement), a finality gadget which provides these things and more.