Blockchain vs Hashgraph
Since becoming commercially available, the internet has democratized information, enabled global communication and brought us revolutionary technologies like Blockchain, Hashgraph, AI. Among these, Hashgraph and Blockchain are the two most talked-about technologies!
Let’s have an insightful discussion over these two duos.
How Hashgraph different from Blockchain?
Though these two duos have similar features that make it very difficult to distinguish them. But, if we closely observe, it’s noticeable that Hashgraph is built over the interface of Blockchain, but, with an alternative consensus mechanism.
Its consensus algorithm provides a new platform for distributed consensus. Some of the attributes commonly used to refer or describe Blockchain are distributed, transparent, consensus-based, transactional and flexible. Hashgraph bears all these features. However, it is a data structure and consensus algorithm that is much faster, fairer, and more secure than blockchain. It is described as a future of distributed ledger technology.
It uses two special techniques to achieve a fast, fair and secure consensus:
- Gossip about Gossip
- Virtual Voting
Gossip about Gossip basically means attaching a small additional amount of information to this Gossip, which are two hashes containing the last two people talked to. Using this information, a Hashgraph can be built and regularly updated when more information is gossiped, on each node. Using a gossip protocol, nodes efficiently and rapidly exchange data with other nodes in the group. This effectively builds a hashgraph data structure using the novel “gossip about gossip” protocol. This data structure is cryptographically secured and contains the history of communication in a community. Using this as an input, nodes run the same virtual-voting consensus algorithm as other nodes. The community reaches consensus on the order and timestamp without any further communication over the internet. Each event is digitally signed by its creator and is kept confidential at both the ends.
Once the Hashgraph is ready, it is easy to know what a node would vote, since we are aware of information that each node has and when they knew it. This data can thus be used as an input to the voting algorithm and to find which transactions have reached consensus quickly.
Let’s understand it with an example:-
The working of Blockchain can be related similarly to that of Hard Disk Drive (HDD), which is having large data storage space, cheaper in cost, easily available. But, at the same time, it has some disadvantage like it has less running speed; while Hashgraph can be related to Solid State Drive (SSD) that rely on flash chips which means it stores data for a short span of time that makes SSDs extremely fast.
Thus, if one is looking for more safe and faster speed then Hashgraph is a better option as compared to a blockchain that though has similar features as that of hashgraph, but, it is comparatively less secure and slower.
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