Compare
Four documents, the same five questions.
No throughput league table and no yield. The cells are what this library is willing to say about the text.
| Question | Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System | Ethereum: A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform | Ouroboros: A Provably Secure Proof-of-Stake Blockchain Protocol | Corda: An Introduction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What the text proposes | Peer-to-peer electronic cash ordered by proof of work. | A general contract machine on a public chain, not cash alone. | Proof of stake with elected slot leaders and a stated synchronous proof. | A ledger of deals between identified firms. Not a public cash chain. |
| Who may write | Whoever wins the work race. Membership is open. | Open membership, as a Bitcoin-like chain that also runs programs. | Leaders sampled in proportion to stake, from an earlier snapshot. | The parties to a deal, plus the notary or uniqueness service the design needs. |
| What is settled | A public chain of cash spends. The paper is not a general contract machine. | Shared state after programs run. The white paper is not the yellow paper. | A chain of blocks. Not a claim about a later network's yield or uptime. | Shared facts about agreements. Data is not broadcast to every node. |
| Load-bearing assumption | Honest majority of computing power, and a network that delivers blocks. | Nodes re-execute. A meter bounds that work. | Honest majority of stake, and the synchrony the proof uses. | Participants are known. Legal identity is a feature of the setting. |
| What this library says afterwards | The PDF is still the citeable design. Lightning is a later channel design. Client history is not the paper. | Clients, the fee market, and rollups came after this PDF. Do not cite the white paper as the live network. | Follow-on Ouroboros papers and Cardano's clients are separate. See the study. | R3 says the 2018 platform paper supersedes this introduction. |
| Rights | Rights uncertain | Rights uncertain | Official external source only | Rights uncertain |