#dusk $DUSK @Dusk

I was reading through Dusk's consensus docs and got stuck on one small detail that turned out to matter more than I expected.
So here's the setup. When a committee votes on a block you only need a certain number of votes to hit quorum. But nothing stops more votes from coming in after that point. Which means you could technically end up with two different valid proofs that quorum was reached for the same block, just with different sets of voters included.
That sounds like a small technical footnote. But it's actually a problem. If you don't pick one specific proof, you can't cleanly figure out who gets rewarded and who gets penalized.

Two different vote sets mean two different reward calculations.
Dusk fixes this in a pretty simple way. Every new block has to include an attestation of the block before it. That attestation is called the block certificate. And its whole job is to lock in one specific unique set of voters for that block. Not a valid set. The set.

So the certificate isn't really about proving the block happened. Consensus already did that. It's about making sure Dusk has exactly one answer to "who voted, and how much do they get paid for it. Small mechanism, but it closes a gap that would otherwise leave Dusk's reward system open to ambiguity.

When is a block's certificate created and included on Dusk Network?