How Does a Consensus Mechanism like PoA Aim to Prevent Malicious Forks?
PoA prevents malicious forks by making them economically unfeasible and requiring coordination between two distinct groups. An attacker needs to control both the majority of hashing power (PoW) and the majority of staked capital (PoS) to sustain a malicious chain.
The stakers, motivated by their capital investment and potential slashing, are incentivized to sign only the legitimate chain, thus quickly invalidating any malicious fork attempt.
Glossar
Malicious Fork
Exploitation ⎊ A malicious fork, within cryptocurrency and derivative markets, represents a deliberate divergence from a blockchain’s consensus rules, enacted to illicitly extract value or disrupt network functionality.
Consensus Mechanism
Validation ⎊ Consensus mechanisms, within cryptocurrency, represent the procedural logic ensuring state agreement across a distributed network, critical for preventing double-spending and maintaining data integrity; their design directly impacts network security and scalability, influencing transaction throughput and finality times, particularly relevant in decentralized finance applications.
Malicious Forks
Fork ⎊ A malicious fork, within cryptocurrency, options trading, and financial derivatives, represents a deliberate divergence from a consensus-supported protocol or established market structure intended to exploit vulnerabilities or manipulate outcomes.
PoA
Mechanism ⎊ Proof of Authority (PoA) is a consensus mechanism where transactions are validated by a limited number of pre-approved, trusted validators rather than through competitive mining.