Four ways the tally could be reached by something that is not a quorum.
A peer that is not a validator could vote. The signed path never had to ask:
VerifyVote resolves the voter's key out of the set at the block's epoch, so an
id that is not in the set has no key and its vote dies there. The
transport-authenticated path has no signature to resolve and the tallies are
keyed by NodeID, so it counted distinct PEERS. A peer need not be a validator to
connect, and its NodeID is a hash of a certificate it makes for itself, so
distinct peers are free to mint. Worst on the reject road, which has no cert in
front of it and commits inline.
One node could vote repeatedly. The engine behind consensus.NewChain appended
votes to a slice and compared its length to alpha, so a single node reached
quorum alone. Votes are now keyed by voter: a second vote from a node replaces
its first. The Config comment called alpha "the number of votes", which is the
same mistake written as prose.
A cert for one block could finalize another. The outer envelope ids are the one
part of a position no signature covers — the signed identity is the inner
canonical — so the id we looked the block up by proves nothing. Re-point it at a
sibling at the same height and a genuine cert asks us to accept a block it does
not name. The arm that finds a wrapper now checks the canonical, which the arm
that finds none already did.
And a node could go silent on a block it still holds. Abandonment stops
re-soliciting peers who cannot vote; the slot sweep read it as "do not vote
either", so the settle pass never offered the slot and the height was never
signed while the block sat pending and undecided. It is also a per-node clock
decision, so it dropped nodes out of the tally at different times. One meaning
now, and no flag to select the other.
Also: a seed below the node's own applied head is refused rather than planting
the certified frontier under it, and the phantom-floor reconcile is deleted —
a repair for a bug already fixed, called by nothing, that asked an operator to
verify a fleet-wide height by hand before it would prune the equivocation
bindings.
Co-authored-by: Hanzo Dev <[email protected]>
- Fixed cmd tools to use new consensus API (NewChain instead of NewChainEngine)
- Removed deprecated Rust tests that use old API
- Fixed golangci-lint configuration
- Applied gofmt formatting to all Go files
- All Go tests passing
- All Python tests passing
- Basic Rust tests passing
BREAKING CHANGE: Package paths have been reorganized for clarity
## Major Changes
### Package Structure
- Collapsed engine/core → engine (removed unnecessary nesting)
- Moved core/types → types (top-level types package)
- Added root facade for single-import experience
- Removed redundant factory.go
### SDK Improvements
All SDKs now provide single-import interfaces:
- Go: import "github.com/luxfi/consensus"
- Python: import lux_consensus as consensus
- Rust: use lux_consensus::*
### Documentation
- Added comprehensive introduction and architecture docs
- Created AI/ML integration guide for researchers
- Added research section with papers and experiments
- Improved sidebar organization and discoverability
### Benefits
- Shallow, obvious import paths
- One responsibility per package
- DRY, composable, orthogonal design
- Idiomatic patterns for each language
- Consistent API across all SDKs
This refactor provides a clean, intuitive developer experience where
one import is enough and things work one way only.
- Replace all snowball/snowflake references with photon/pulse/wave terminology
- Update test function names to use new nomenclature (TestPhotonBinary, TestWaveMultiChoice, etc.)
- Fix TestParameters Beta value from 1 to 2 to prevent immediate finalization
- Fix wave preference update logic to properly reset non-voted choices
- Make photon Add() method idempotent to allow re-adding same choice
- Rename test files: binary_snowball_test.go → photon_binary_test.go, etc.
- Update struct field names: snowflakePreference → wavePreference/pulsePreference
- Change Nnary to MultiChoice throughout the codebase
- Update comments to remove avalanche-specific terminology
Most tests now pass with the new terminology. Some test failures remain in
the main consensus package that need further investigation, but core protocol
implementations (photon, pulse, wave, prism, quasar) are working correctly.
zeekayandHanzo Dev