The first design of blockchain engineering by Satoshi had only one fear - an offline node. Each big protocol created after Satoshi's design caught this fear and multiplied it: Ethereum and slashing, Cosmos and jailing, Polkadot and epoch-based stake forfeiture. All of these consensus mechanism rules follow the same logic: an offline node is a failing node.
Fogo has completely flipped this logic:
and in doing so may have stumbled on one of the most unexpected and powerful insights into distributed system design ever created: A system that allows its nodes to participate in a planned way rather than being always-online is stronger than one where nodes are always online.
"Follow the Sun"- What it Means in Terms of the Protocol
Fogo has a unique approach to consensus mechanism design called "follow the sun". This simply means that nodes (validators) move to different locations on the planet where trading is occurring based on the time. Asia's traders move to Singapore and Hong Kong, when it's time for European trading to occur the nodes move to London, and eventually for American traders they move to New York.
On its face, most people will simply describe this feature as a way to improve latency, which is true. However this does not fully grasp the shift in how this paradigm works. What Fogo has really achieved here is that it has legitimized offline nodes at predictable times in the participation lifecycle.
The process of nodes selecting where to move to is via an on chain voting mechanism and the nodes must have time to build out secure infrastructure in that selected location before they move to it. In absence of any trading activity happening in the selected location (because the correct time is not present in the correct region or the location is wrong) the nodes will not be punished or considered failing in the slightest. They will be offline, as intended. They just simply hand off the duty of facilitating transactions to the next zone.
This is not laziness, this is deliberate.
Antifragility Over Up-time: Re-writing what reliability means in a blockchain.
Traditionally, block-chain systems rely on up-time metrics: 99.9% online presence at all times. The slightest instance of being down is considered an immediate threat. This type of reliability concept, while proven over and over for existing infrastructure like power grids and water systems, fundamentally doesn't work with decentralized networks. Decentralization inherently means that nodes have the ability to be down. The current problem has been the over-eagerness of trying to turn these networks into centralized ones.
Fogos architecture acknowledges this and does exactly the opposite. In the event that the elected zone is down, or that consensus on the location of the next node can't be reached, the protocol automatically falls back to its global consensus state, which while it is slower, it is safe and it always works. So the fall-back is not necessarily a failure, but rather it is the system functioning at a more rudimentary speed.
Nassim Taleb has referred to such systems as antifragile; that is a system that not only survives but gets better when faced with randomness. The issue with the current way in which blockchain systems operate is that randomness hasn't been welcomed, but rather a specific kind of randomness has been prohibited (being offline without a warning). By making one of the most common scenarios, nodes being absent from the system, deliberate, Fogo will dramatically reduce the likelihood of uncontrolled offline node situations arising.
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