I like to frequently challenge my assumptions even though I’m a huge fan of the IC. Clearly what is fascinating about the IC is chain key technology and thus its ability to continuously adding more shards/subnets. At the same time though running dapps eventually across many subnets will introduce additional problems around latency. So obviously we still need the best possible consensus mechanism.
Lately, I was randomly reading into other Blockchain designs just to keep up with what is going on. Some of them do claim to offer orders of magnitudes more transactions per second (I know the metric has its issues). Something like hedera’s hashgraph seems to make intuitive sense and the person who invented it seems reasonable enough that I have some trust it not being complete garbage.
So I’m just curious to hear your thoughts on that. Is the consensus algorithm something that could still be improved? How much scale can be unlocked with improvements to the current mechanism?
And in case the sharded nature of the IC prohibits probabilistic consensus I’d be interested to better understand why that is the case (there is always some notion of finality right?).