It is assumed that blockchain technology should not have failures due to technical reasons or they should be extremely short-lived. In recent months, however, more and more blockchains are crashing for one reason or another.
Recently, there was a failure in the Steemit network, which caused users to worry and be indignant: on September 17, for several hours in a row, bloggers could not post anything to the site due to a network failure. Due to problems, new blocks stopped being added to the network, and all applications based on this blockchain stopped working. According to the company, the Steem network shutdown is due to the upcoming hard fork. On some nodes on the network, the updated code was run in advance, which caused the chain to fork prematurely and the network nodes were unable to reach consensus on new blocks.
"By stopping the addition of blocks, all (approximately 400) applications on this blockchain crashed," said Ned Scott, founder and CEO of Steemit. This made some users very upset and angry, who couldn't understand why their favorite tools weren't available. As the Steemit network began to function normally again, critical and sarcastic posts appeared.
The Steem network incident was not the only example of blockchain downtime in recent times.
In March there was a failure in the Neo network. Malcolm Lerider, senior manager of research and development for the project, said this can happen when a consensus node goes offline while reaching consensus. In response to criticism that the fall of just seven consensus nodes can take down the entire network, making it extremely vulnerable, he added that the network can withstand the loss of a consensus node, but in this incident there were other reasons for the network failure.
A few months earlier, the generation of new blocks on the EOS network stopped for almost five hours. According to Thomas Cox, former vice president of Block.One (the company behind the EOS protocol), the pending transactions were not properly validated, leading to an uncertain state of the network and stopping the generation of new blocks. This incident occurred just days after the full launch of the EOS network in June.
These examples raise the question of why networks that are supposed to work smoothly begin to freeze. The answer may lie in the emergence of new consensus algorithms..
According to some experts, in Bitcoin, Ethereum and other networks in which consensus is achieved using the Proof-of-Work principle, failures are extremely unlikely, even if a large number of nodes fail. And the Neo, EOS and Steem networks, which operate on the principle of delegated proof of stake (Proof-of-stake), are more susceptible to outages. These networks entrust certain nodes with making decisions on the network instead of mining, allowing for faster and cheaper transactions. However, Malcolm Lerider disagrees with this statement, arguing that these networks can use different consensus algorithms, and to find out which ones fail, it is necessary to analyze each specific case.
Nevertheless, delegated consensus has brought massive scalability to cryptocurrencies, allowing them to do things that previously only centralized providers could do. For example, Steem and EOS can support millions of transactions per day. But on the other hand, these networks are subject to the potential risk of instability.
According to Eric Wall, an expert at the fintech company Cinnober, in any implementation of distributed computing it is possible to provide no more than two of the following three properties: data consistency, availability and partition resistance. Split resistance is a must, so engineers can either add availability, as in the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks, or data consistency, as in the EOS, Steem and Neo networks. From the user's point of view, the Bitcoin network will never "fall", but there is no guarantee that the user will not end up on a fork that is neglected in favor of the main network. “Two conflicting forks are much more dangerous than one network outage,” says Eric Wall.
In any case, the Steem network is still planning to carry out the planned (20th) hard fork on September 25.
According to https://www.coindesk.com/
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