Picture two miners on opposite sides of the world. Each finds a valid block at almost the same moment. On most blockchains, only one of those blocks can survive. The other is thrown away, along with the work that made it. ATON is designed so that both are kept.
This post explains why ties happen, what a single chain does with them, and how ATON's GHOSTDAG-style rule puts every block into one order that everybody agrees on.
Why ties happen
A new block takes time to reach every computer on the network. While it travels, another miner who has not seen it yet can find a block of their own. Neither miner did anything wrong. They simply had not heard about each other yet.
What a single chain does with a tie
In a single chain, every block must have exactly one parent. So when two blocks arrive together, the network has to pick one. The loser is dropped, and its miner's work counts for nothing.
That has a cost. Work that is thrown away does not protect anything. And to keep ties rare, a single chain has to make blocks slowly enough that each one usually reaches everybody before the next is found.
What ATON does instead
ATON is a block-DAG: a graph of blocks rather than a single line. Four steps turn that graph into one agreed history.
- Made in parallel. Miners do not wait for a block to reach everybody before making the next. Several blocks can appear at nearly the same moment, and every one of them is kept.
- Linked to its parents. Each new block names every block its miner has seen at the tips as a parent. A block can have several parents.
- Coloured blue or red. A GHOSTDAG-style rule colours each block. Blue means well connected to the rest, as blocks mined honestly and published promptly are. Red means it is not, as a block held back and published late would not be.
- Laid into one order. From the graph and its colours, the same rule puts every block in a single order. Every node with the same blocks gets the same order, and every block comes after its parents.
| Question | A single chain | ATON |
|---|---|---|
| Two blocks at once | One is thrown away | Both are kept |
| Parents per block | Exactly one | One or more |
| How history is agreed | The longest line wins | One order from the whole graph |
Why the colours matter
Keeping every block raises a fair question: what about a miner who builds blocks in secret and releases them later? That miner's blocks are not well connected to what everybody else was building at the time, so the rule colours them red. Honest blocks, published promptly, end up blue.
What is not decided yet
The ordering rule has a setting called k: how many blocks may be made in parallel before a block is coloured red. Its value is not specified yet. Neither is the target rate at which blocks are made. When both are settled, they go into the specification first, and then onto the site.
Until then, you will not see a speed or throughput figure from us, because there is no honest one to give.
