#dusk $DUSK @Dusk
So when a transaction is "confirmed," what has actually happened?
In the past, I used to treat confirmation and finality as the same word. I would see a transaction go through, wait a little, and consider the matter closed. If someone had asked me whether it could still be reversed, I would have said no without really thinking about why.
But the more I looked into how Dusk describes settlement, the more I realized I had been merging two different ideas.
On most chains, a transaction becomes safer the longer you wait. Nothing declares it permanent. You simply reach a point where reversing it would be so expensive that nobody reasonably would. That is a probability, not a promise.
Dusk approaches it differently. Its consensus is designed so that a block is settled by the rules of the protocol itself, rather than becoming gradually safer over time.
What I found particularly notable is why that distinction matters far more in finance than in ordinary crypto use. If I send someone money and it takes another minute to feel safe, nothing important happens. But a settlement system cannot operate on "very likely permanent." Somebody has to be accountable for the moment a transfer becomes irreversible, and that moment has to be a fact rather than an estimate.
This also explains something that puzzled me earlier. Building a settlement layer from scratch is enormous work when faster options already exist. It only makes sense if the guarantee itself is the product.
I am still not in a position to say how this behaves when the network is under real pressure rather than normal conditions. That is where designs usually reveal what they actually promised.
But from here I stopped reading "confirmed" as a single idea. There is the moment a transaction happens, and there is the moment it stops being reversible, and those two are not always the same thing.
So when a transaction is "confirmed," what has actually happened?
In the past, I used to treat confirmation and finality as the same word. I would see a transaction go through, wait a little, and consider the matter closed. If someone had asked me whether it could still be reversed, I would have said no without really thinking about why.
But the more I looked into how Dusk describes settlement, the more I realized I had been merging two different ideas.
On most chains, a transaction becomes safer the longer you wait. Nothing declares it permanent. You simply reach a point where reversing it would be so expensive that nobody reasonably would. That is a probability, not a promise.
Dusk approaches it differently. Its consensus is designed so that a block is settled by the rules of the protocol itself, rather than becoming gradually safer over time.
What I found particularly notable is why that distinction matters far more in finance than in ordinary crypto use. If I send someone money and it takes another minute to feel safe, nothing important happens. But a settlement system cannot operate on "very likely permanent." Somebody has to be accountable for the moment a transfer becomes irreversible, and that moment has to be a fact rather than an estimate.
This also explains something that puzzled me earlier. Building a settlement layer from scratch is enormous work when faster options already exist. It only makes sense if the guarantee itself is the product.
I am still not in a position to say how this behaves when the network is under real pressure rather than normal conditions. That is where designs usually reveal what they actually promised.
But from here I stopped reading "confirmed" as a single idea. There is the moment a transaction happens, and there is the moment it stops being reversible, and those two are not always the same thing.