whitepaperConsensus2016
The Swirlds Hashgraph Consensus Algorithm: Fair, Fast, Byzantine Fault Tolerance
Hedera. Leemon Baird.
Baird's technical report on hashgraph: gossip about gossip, a virtual vote computed from the graph, and a fairness claim about the order of transactions. Hedera is the later public network that uses the algorithm under a governing council.
The problem the paper names
Voting protocols send votes. Baird's claim is that if every node gossips the history of who told whom, the votes can be calculated from that history and do not need to be sent.
What the design proposes
- Events contain transactions plus hashes of earlier self-events and received events. The data structure is the hashgraph.
- Seeing, and strongly seeing, are defined on that graph. Famous witnesses are decided from those relations.
- Ordering uses a median of timestamps from famous witnesses, which is the paper's fairness device.
How the mechanism is specified
- The argument assumes a known set of nodes and a bound on the fraction that are Byzantine.
- Virtual voting saves the vote messages only if the gossip really delivered the parent hashes.
- Fair ordering in the paper is a property of that timestamp median, not a general promise about markets.
What this page does not treat as proven
- The report is not Hedera's council charter, fee schedule or token terms.
- A permissioned set of gossip peers is load-bearing. Opening the set changes the theorem you are allowed to quote.
- Fairness here does not mean a user received a good price.
Why a venture studio still reads it
Read this when someone says 'our consensus is fair' . Ask whether they mean Baird's timestamp median over famous witnesses, or a marketing adjective. Those are not the same sentence.
This is Blockchain Lab's reading of a public design paper. It is not the paper, not a copy of it, and not an offer of tokens, equity, custody or a partnership. Later network behaviour can diverge from the text. Nothing here is investment, legal or technical advice.