Glossary
Consensus Mechanism
The rule a blockchain uses to decide which block comes next, so that independent nodes converge on the same ordered history.
A consensus mechanism is the procedure that lets a permissionless network of nodes — some of which may be malicious or offline — agree on a single ordering of transactions.
Proof-of-work weights the vote by computation spent; proof-of-stake weights it by economic stake; BFT-style protocols use rounds of explicit voting among a validator set. Each design trades off between throughput, finality time, energy use, and the cost of attacking the network.