Consensus system for manipulation resistant digital record keeping
OwnerLance Kasper, Vikram Rajkumarinventors
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
The disclosure describes a peer-to-peer consensus system and method for maintaining a manipulation resistant updateable shared ledger. The system achieves consensus on a shared ledger between a plurality of peers and prevents double spending in light of network latency, data corruption and intentional manipulation of the system. Consensus is achieved and double spending is prevented via the use of the widest chain metric to choose a single consensus transaction record. A trustable record is also facilitated by allowing stakeholders to elect a set of trusted non-colluding block signers to cooperatively add transactions to the consensus record. The voting mechanism is a real-time auditable stake weighted approval voting mechanism.
Claims2
A decentralized consensus system for maintaining a shared digital ledger, the system comprising:
- i) a plurality of node computers, each node computer in said plurality of node computers including a processing unit, some amount of memory accessed by said processing unit, and a network interface operatively coupled to said processing unit and a wide area network;
- ii) each node computer in said plurality of node computers including a consensus system software application running on said processing unit of said node computer;
- and
- iii) said consensus system software application adapted to:
- 1) load an initial ledger;
- 2) connect to peer nodes over said wide area network;
- 3) download block chain data from connected peer nodes, said block chain data including one or more data block chains, each data block chain of said one or more data block chains including a set of data blocks, each data block within said set of data blocks signed by a block signer and including a set (zero or more) of transactions.
- 4) check validity of said block chain data using a set of consensus rules to determine whether data blocks within said set of data blocks follow a set of protocol rules;
- 5) where said block chain data includes more than one data block chain, determine a consensus data block chain based on a widest chain metric, wherein said consensus data block chain includes a set of valid transactions and a set of valid data blocks;
- 6) pass said set of valid transactions and said set of valid data blocks to one or more connected peers over said wide area network, wherein said set of valid transactions and said set of valid data blocks are verified to follow said set of protocol rules;
- and
- 7) maintain a current ledger, said current ledger built from said initial ledger, said valid transactions and said valid data blocks included in said consensus data block chain.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.