Novel Consensus Mechanisms

This chapter covers consensus mechanisms beyond the classical BFT and Nakamoto families—Avalanche’s subsampled voting, DAG-based ledgers, the GHOST fork-choice rule, Ouroboros’s provably secure PoS, Nakamoto variants like Bitcoin-NG and PHANTOM, and how probabilistic, deterministic, and economic finality compare in practice. By the end you should at least be able to sniff-test a deck that waves the word “consensus” around.