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In the Stellar Consensus Protocol SCP, the voting procedure follows a 3 phase commit i.e. vote, accept and confirm i.e. see section 5.

Is this a novel introduction or has this been previously been introduced, and if so, where? More specifically, I refer to definitions of these given in section 5.

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  • $\begingroup$ @Discretelizard I tried to clarify the question. What I want to know is whether the specifics of this 3 phase commit is standard or whether it could be considered novel. $\endgroup$
    – nbcb
    Jul 25, 2019 at 14:26
  • $\begingroup$ Ok, the question seems clear to me. I tried to improve the title a bit and add some relevant tags. $\endgroup$
    – Discrete lizard ♦
    Jul 25, 2019 at 14:39

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This dates back to the Byzantine broadcast algorithm of Bracha:

Bracha, Gabriel. "Asynchronous Byzantine agreement protocols." Information and Computation 75.2 (1987): 130-143.

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  • $\begingroup$ So would it be correct to say that Bracha introduces the idea of a three phase commit? If not, how is this different to a 3PC? And so is the vote, accept, confirm process adopted by Stellar more closely related to Bracha or 3PC? $\endgroup$
    – nbcb
    Sep 23, 2019 at 17:18
  • $\begingroup$ What do you mean by 3PC? Do you mean the algorithm of Skeen and Stonebraker? Also it seems to me that SCP's federated voting and Bracha broadcast only have 2 phases: one phase to send vote messages and one phase to send accept messages. Anyway, from my point of view SCP's federated voting is a variant of Bracha broadcast. $\endgroup$
    – nano
    Sep 25, 2019 at 21:47
  • $\begingroup$ In SCP, there is the vote, accept and confirm stages ie 3 stages (see fig 11 of WP). I am trying to figure out how this ties in to previous work ( eg if it builds on Bracha and adds the confirm stage, then does the idea of introducing the confirm stage tie in to previous work?) $\endgroup$
    – nbcb
    Sep 26, 2019 at 16:28
  • $\begingroup$ Although it might be done in practice for performance reasons, it is not strictly necessary to send messages attesting that a node reached the confirm stage (all the safety and liveness properties of federated voting will still hold). So at the core it is a two phases protocol. What is new compared to Bracha broadcast is that SCP relies on the notion of v-blocking in order for accept statements to cascade throughout the entire system. $\endgroup$
    – nano
    Sep 26, 2019 at 17:12

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