As per Bitcoin's documentation, the consensus mechanism in Bitcoin Blockchain is based on PoW. Thus, any miner node successfully computing the hash as per difficulty is eligible to mine a block and also validate all transactions included in the block. Now, once the block is mined, all full nodes check the validity of the computed nonce and also validate the transactions based on the complete history of transaction input and output. My question is that is there any relation between PoW and typical Byzantine Fault Tolerance used as a state replication protocol?
1 Answer
PoW achieves the same outcome as BFT. However, the way in which they arrive at the same outcome is different. PoW is for environment where there are untrusted actors. Unlike BFT protocols where it is semi-trusted.