Satoshi's original blockchain engineering has had one nightmare. That of the offline node.Every single large protocol which came after Satoshi's design inherited this fear and exaggerated it further. Ethereum had slashing, cosmos had jailing, polkadot had era based stake forfeiture etc. All the consensus rules are based on one main idea, that the node which is down is a failing node.
The Fogo has just completely revolutionised that.
In doing so it has potentially hit upon one of the most counter intuitive ideas for distributed system design, that a system that allows nodes to remain down in a structured manner is more resilient than a system which forces its nodes to be always up.
What follow the sun actually is in the protocol level
The fogos protocol model has an unique idea called follow the sun, in which validators move into locations depending on who is trading. When it's day time in Asia, then it moves to the Singapore or Hong kong, then to London for European trading, then to new york for American trading.
While the world thinks about this concept in terms of reducing latency and it is the case, this statement doesn't go into depth in regards to what is fundamentally being changed. Fogo has made it permissible for nodes to be inactive during certain times.
Nodes vote into which zone to go to with the protocol, agreeing on the consensus. With this the node is then allowed sufficient time to safely provision its infrastructure in the new region. In the period of downtime, where its daytime is over and wrong region, that node doesn't fail, or get punished; it simply rests from being active as per the protocol rules, letting another region's node take over,
this is not about being lazy but being precise.
Antifragility vs Up-time, redefining the reliable
reliability of blockchain has traditionally always been in terms of node up-time. We want 99.9% uptime for any given blockchain. The downtime however short for a given node is a security threat.
This kind of thinking is inspired from systems such as power grids and water systems, where if any part of the system fails then the entire system is at risk, but a blockchain is not a power grid. It's strong precisely due to the ability of the nodes to remain dormant at any point in time, what we as humans have been doing is trying to build power grids out of blockchain systems.
Fogo has now reversed this logic, as soon as the target region fails for some reason (either due to the time of the day is not correct or it's the wrong continent and node validators cannot vote for the next region), the protocol goes into the global consensus mode which is much slower but absolutely safe and secure, the backup is not a failure it is a slow safe system rather than a complete halt.
Nassim Talebs concept of antifragility implies that the system does not only survive against shocks but strengthens from them. Fogo does not eliminate the ups and downs that can be seen from validators coming and going; it ensures them through predictable mechanisms and a controlled process. A dormant or dead validator zone due to time is not a threat, whereas an unexpected offline zone is. Fogo effectively minimizes the chances of a latter one from occurring by addressing the former.
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