Might is Right
Imagine a group of friends is deciding about which movie to watch, a horror or a comedy!!. Usual way is by majority vote. If 6 out of 10 like horror, all 10 have to go to a horror movie. This is `51%` (basically, >50%) way. This activity is called consensus mechanism. In this case, as all friends are together, know/trust each other and are in same location, arriving at consensus is easy. But in case of distributed systems, such as Blockchain, how do we arrive at the consensus, say, for validating a transaction? The one who wins the consensus, gets to validate the transaction and in return earns some reward. So, all effort goes in winning the consensus.
Ethereum 2.0 has come up with a new consensus mechanism called `Proof of Stake`, a radically different approach than the previously prevalent `Proof of Work’ approach.
Following sketchnote is about comparison of the two approaches:
Originally published at LinkedIn