What is Tendermint?
Tendermint is a protocol for building blockchains that are provably Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT).
What is BFT?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance
What is Cosmos?
Cosmos is a decentralized network of independent parallel blockchains, each powered by Tendermint.
4 Elements in Cosmos
Atoms - a license for holders to stake and vote
Validators - responsible for committing new blocks
Zones - blockchains that can exchange values through Hubs
Hubs - A blockchain that let Zones work together
Positives for Cosmos
- 10,000 TPS, 1 second finality
- You can simulate many blockchains on this (Ethereum, Bitcoin, etc).
- Energy Efficient compared to PoW
Negatives for Cosmos
- 1/3 validators goes rogue is less than 51% needed for attack on BTC?
- Been in development for almost 1 year, only 74% complete
- Lack of interest?
Bottom Line: Tendermint has been in development since 2014, while several projects will be using it (CEEK, DATA), it is still not complete as of March 2018.
Cosmo fundraised (not ICO, hopefully SEC agrees) $17 million in just 8 minutes, but will probably be released after EOS, which ICO 2 months after. It will be interesting to see who will be more popular in 2018 (or if we are just still talking about Ethereum).
Links:
https://tendermint.com/
https://tendermint.readthedocs.io/en/master/introduction.html#what-is-tendermint
Practical BFT Whitepaper: http://pmg.csail.mit.edu/papers/osdi99.pdf
https://cosmos.network/
https://cosmos.network/roadmap
http://cryptoeconomy.info/2017/04/06/cosmos-ico-over-17-m-raised-in-just-8-minutes/
http://data.eco/
https://www.ceek.com/
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