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Deprecation notice

Consortium networks have been deprecated. This guide is for historical reference.

MultiChain is a fork of Bitcoin Core.

MultiChain is a permissioned consortium blockchain protocol.

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Consensus

MultiChain achieves consensus by validating blocks in a round-robin scheme with a mining-diversity parameter.

All nodes with the addresses with the mine permission take a turn in validating blocks in the network.

The way the mine nodes take turns in validating blocks is determined by the network’s mining-diversity parameter.

The mining-diversity parameter can be set to any value between 0 and 1:

  • 1 — every mine node in the network must take a turn in block validation per round. This is the strictest setting.
  • 0 — not every mine node must take a turn in block validation per round; any mine node can take turns in block validation in a random fashion. This is the loosest setting.

The round-robin scheme is the following:

  • Determine the number of nodes with the mine permission in the network.
  • Multiply the number of mine nodes by the mining-diversity value to get the value spacing.
  • Check if the mine node validating the current block validated a spacing-1 block. If the mine node validated a spacing-1 block, render the block invalid.

The default mining-diversity parameter is 0.3 and cannot be changed once the chain is initialized.

Round-robin example with 10 mine nodes with mining-diversity set to 0.3:

  • 10 nodes permitted to validate blocks.
  • 10×0.3=3. spacing is 3. spacing-1 is 2.
  • Each mine node in the network can validate every third block and cannot validate two blocks in a row.

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Service nodes

A MultiChain network is deployed with the following service node: