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How networks work
Consensus is not agreement about truth or value; it is agreement about the order of transactions and which valid history counts.
01 — What is a blockchain network actually agreeing on?
Consensus is not agreement about truth or value; it is agreement about the order of transactions and which valid history counts.
7 min
02 — Proof of work: what the electricity actually buys
Mining converts energy into a cost of rewriting history; the security claim rests on that cost, not on the arithmetic being difficult.
7 min
03 — Proof of stake: the bond a validator posts
Staking swaps an external energy cost for capital locked inside the system that the protocol can destroy when a validator signs two histories.
8 min
04 — Why confirmed means different things on different chains
Probabilistic depth, economic finality and per-block agreement are three different promises, and confirmation counts are institutions translating them.
8 min
05 — Forks and reorganizations, and what each one costs
A fork may be a one-block race, a coordinated rule change, or an attack; the three differ in cost by orders of magnitude.
8 min
06 — Who miners and validators are, and how they get paid
Block producers are businesses with power bills or locked capital, earning from new issuance, user fees, and the value of ordering transactions.
7 min
07 — The security budget and what happens as the subsidy falls
Block rewards pay for security now; on capped-supply chains fees must grow into that role, and no mechanism guarantees they will.
8 min
08 — What a node does, and why running one matters
A full node checks every rule itself; light clients, archive nodes and hosted endpoints each trade part of that checking for convenience.
7 min
09 — How a network upgrades itself, and who actually decides
Changes travel through proposals, client releases and coordinated activation, and the decisive power belongs to whoever chooses to run the software.
8 min
10 — What a layer 2 inherits from its layer 1, and what it does not
Rollups borrow data availability and settlement from a base chain, while sequencing, upgrade keys and withdrawal delays remain their own risks.
9 min