Choosing a Consensus Protocol for Uses Cases in Distributed Ledger Technologies

Abstract

A key issue for Distributed Ledger Technologies is how to agree on any changes to the Ledger; the way to reach such an agreement is known as consensus protocol. There are currently many platforms and implementations of DLTs, each offering a more or less effective way to reach consensus. As a result, it is sometimes difficult to know which consensus mechanism is most appropriate for a given use case. We propose in this short paper a draft methodology to choose between a lottery-based consensus and a voting-based consensus. We take in account several indicators, both related to the requirements of the use case in question, but also to its position relatively to the tradeoff ”Security - Scalability - Decentralization”.