Democratic Byzantine Fault Tolerance

Definition ∞ Democratic Byzantine Fault Tolerance is a consensus mechanism where network participants collectively agree on the validity of transactions, even if some participants are malicious or faulty. This system ensures the network can continue to operate correctly as long as a supermajority of participants act honestly. It prioritizes broad participation and distributed decision-making to maintain system integrity. This approach provides robust resilience against system failures and attacks.
Context ∞ The discussion around democratic Byzantine Fault Tolerance centers on achieving both security and scalability in decentralized networks. A primary challenge involves designing protocols that can sustain high transaction throughput without compromising the security guarantees of distributed consensus. Researchers are actively working on optimizations to reduce communication overhead and latency in these systems. This mechanism is fundamental to the reliability of many next-generation blockchain platforms.