From the course: What Is Web3?

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What is a consensus mechanism?

What is a consensus mechanism? - Blockchain Tutorial

From the course: What Is Web3?

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What is a consensus mechanism?

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- Imagine this scenario: I have two coins and I owe you and your friend two coins each. If the coins were physical coins, I could only pay one of you with my two coins. If we used a centralized ledger like a bank account, again, I could only pay one of you with my two coins. This is how money works and why we trust banks with our money. There's a single source of truth. But in the proposed web three, the centralized bank has been replaced with a distributed trustless ledger and there's no single source of truth. Instead, we all have a copy of the ledger, the blockchain, and it gets updated with new blocks whenever transactions are made. This introduces an interesting problem. Let's say, I tell you I'm transferring my two coins to you over the blockchain. You'll check your copy of the blockchain to make sure I actually have two coins and then add the transaction to the next open block in the chain. Meanwhile, I…

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