Consensus assumptions

We employ the term "global ledger" to refer to the fundamental data structure maintained by the PoT protocol in order to support the specific services it offers. While blockchains are one method for implementing a reliable ledger, there are alternative approaches as well. We anticipate that PoT protocol implementations will utilize Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) systems for their underlying ledgers, which significantly predate blockchains like EOS.io. We view a ledger generally as having a few key properties:

• Append-Remove: Data, once added, can be removed but cannot be modified.

• Public: The contents are accessible to everyone, which are consistent across time.

• Available: The ledger can always be written to by authorized writers and read by anyone in a timely way.

A wide variety of modern BFT protocols are supported in the PoT protocol. The exact choice will depend on trust assumptions and characteristics among the network nodes. The PoT protocol could in principle be implemented in a highly performant permissionless blockchain or in an adaptive and scalable layer-2 or blockchain .