Hedera explainer series
Gossip Protocol, Three Levels
This is the same protocol, explained at three depths so city leaders, operators, and technical teams can align without hand-wavy explanations. One shared understanding, one shared trust layer.
Level 1 — ELI5
Audience: EveryoneEach computer quickly tells a few other computers what it just learned. They repeat that until everyone knows.
Every message points to earlier messages like linked receipts, so fake history is easy to detect.
It helps the network agree on the same order of events without a single boss server.
Flow: new event -> gossip spread -> shared event graph -> final order
Why this matters for Salvage: listings, inspections, commitments, and payout triggers can all land on one timeline that nobody can secretly rewrite.
Level 2 — Operator
Audience: Ops + PartnersEvents include cryptographic links to parent events, creating a shared DAG of who knew what and when.
Nodes infer vote outcomes from the DAG without broadcasting extra vote messages, reducing coordination overhead.
Once consensus order is reached, records are effectively final for business settlement and audit workflows.
Flow: DAG propagation -> virtual vote inference -> consensus timestamp -> final settlement record
Why this matters for Salvage: operator disputes shrink because every handoff can be reconciled against the same agreed event order.
Level 3 — Technical Deep Dive
Audience: Technical TeamsEach event stores transaction payload plus hash pointers to self-parent and other-parent, building immutable causal context.
Famous witness detection and rounds progress enable asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerant consensus under adversarial conditions.
Consensus timestamps derive from witness perspectives, then deterministic ordering yields stable execution inputs.
Flow: hashed parent links -> rounds/witnesses -> fame decisions -> consensus timestamp/order -> execution rails