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Liveness Safety Tradeoffs

Definition

Liveness safety tradeoffs represent a fundamental challenge in distributed system design, particularly in blockchain consensus. Liveness refers to the system’s ability to continue processing transactions and making progress, while safety guarantees that all honest participants agree on the same, correct state and that invalid transactions are never confirmed. Protocols must balance these two properties, as maximizing one often compromises the other. Achieving both simultaneously under adverse conditions is a complex engineering task.