Proof of History - Solana PoH

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Proof of History is not a consensus mechanism, but it is a way to integrating time to blokchain data.

We give each blocks a time stamp, so each validators could sequence blocks without communicating (Since we all know how to rank time).

Ask all nodes to send data by time, and then organize later.

In Solana, validators can actually run smart contract code in a parallel way.

With Proof of History, you can create a historical record that proves that an event has occurred at a specific moment in time.

In short: communication overhead. Since Proof of History (PoH) provides a trustless sense of time and ordering of messages, network nodes can trust the relative message times that they receive in the PoH broadcast without having to communicate with all the other nodes in the network.

For many distributed networks, the time to finality (the guarantee that past transactions on a digital ledger are legitimate and will not change) scales as the square or even the cube of the number of nodes in the system due to the necessity to confer with other network participants on message ordering.

All Solana events and transactions are hashed with the SHA256 hash function. Using this function, Solana takes an input and produces a unique output that is extremely difficult to predict. Solana takes the output of a transaction and uses it as input for the next hash. The sequence of transactions is now built into the hashed output.

This hashing process creates a long, unbroken chain of hashed transactions. This characteristic creates a clear, verifiable sequence of transactions that a validator adds to a block, without the need for a conventional timestamp. Hashing also takes a certain time to complete, meaning that validators can easily check how much time has passed.

PoH(A, time stamp 0) -> hash: encrypted version of A on time stamp 0

PoH(B, time stamp 1) -> hash: encrypted version of B on time stamp 1

PoH(C, time stamp 2) -> hash: encrypted version of C on time stamp 2

Due to this objective security, humans do not need to be involved during validation. This makes validation several times faster than PoW and PoS. As a result, Solana achieves transaction speeds of up to 50,000 transactions per second (TPS)

Each node helps networks agree on time and ordering of events

If you want to participate as a validator at Solana, your hardware must meet strict requirements. 1 transaction is about 250kb. 50,000 TPS of 250kb equals about 40 petabytes of data per year. That is a tremendously high amount of data and many companies, let alone private individuals, cannot store this amount of data.

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Proof of History - Solana PoH

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