Please excuse me if this is ignorant but if there are no blocks how does one know when a tx is "confirmed" ?
How do I know there is not another tx around the corner that has an even highter consensus value that some of the trusted nodes just haven't seen yet ?
Is there a specific time that a tx needs to be on the ledger for so it can be considered confirmed ?
Is there a certain threshhold of consensus value that a tx needs before it is actually added to the ledger at which point every future tx will be disregarded ?
Transactions are not committed to the ledger until there is a majority vote on them by the currently selected and agreed group of voters. Votes are final, so by effect consensus is too.
The ledger is append-only, so once a majority consensus between the set of voters has been reached, any conflicting transactions are simply ignored.
If a transaction is not agreed upon within 4 vote rounds (30 seconds each) from its declared timestamp it is discarded. If it is presented after 4 vote rounds have passed since its declared timestamp, it is automatically discarded and to send those assets a new transaction would have to be recreated with a current timestamp and resulting hash.
Thanks for explaining. I must not read anymore primers before my first coffee. I hadn't even realized that there are agreed upon voters. I though trusted nodes just sign and then at some point all nodes in the network will have gotten it signed by one of their trusted nodes.