hexresearch / hexresearch/hschain

Working of future commits in Tendermint

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consensus engine
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Description

Tendermint has very interseting comment about handling of future commits:

```
// VerifyFutureCommit will check to see if the set would be valid with a different
// validator set.
//
// vals is the old validator set that we know. Over 2/3 of the power in old
// signed this block.
//
// In Tendermint, 1/3 of the voting power can halt or fork the chain, but 1/3
// can't make arbitrary state transitions. You still need > 2/3 Byzantine to
// make arbitrary state transitions.
//
// To preserve this property in the light client, we also require > 2/3 of the
// old vals to sign the future commit at H, that way we preserve the property
// that if they weren't being truthful about the validator set at H (block hash
// -> vals hash) or about the app state (block hash -> app hash) we can slash
// > 2/3. Otherwise, the lite client isn't providing the same security
// guarantees.
//
// Even if we added a slashing condition that if you sign a block header with
// the wrong validator set, then we would only need > 1/3 of signatures from
// the old vals on the new commit, it wouldn't be sufficient because the new
// vals can be arbitrary and commit some arbitrary app hash.
//
// newSet is the validator set that signed this block. Only votes from new are
// sufficient for 2/3 majority in the new set as well, for it to be a valid
// commit.
//
// NOTE: This doesn't check whether the commit is a future commit, because the
// current height isn't part of the ValidatorSet. Caller must check that the
// commit height is greater than the height for this validator set.
```

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