The first and most important contribution of TAU is an
original consensus mechanism POT. It uses on-chain
historical accumulated transactions to determine who
can propose a new block. TAU’s block generation is
called harvesting instead of mining, as all tokens are
created in the genesis block and block reward only
comes in the form of transaction fee. For every
participating address, the probability of generating a
new block is exactly in linear proportion to number of
historical transactions made or received within a
certain time window. This cumulative number is called
harvest power. See Chapter 4 for details.
The second improvement is that TAU supports signal
transaction. It enables every address, even those with
small harvest power, to participate in the form of
harvest club and receive its fair share of reward. Block
reward is wired through a special type of transaction
called club wiring, in which reward is distrusted to all
club members via a single transaction. Both harvest
club and club wiring make the process of harvest
more convenient for most participants. See Chapter 3
for details.
Inspired by NXT and NEM, TAU uses similar methods
to generate random number among harvest clubs, to
adjust block interval times and to handle temporary
chain forks. On a base level, TAU uses Bitcoin
technologies that have been proved reliable. These
include public-key cryptography, digital signature,
Merkle tree and address-based transactions. Blocks
are organized in a way similar to Bitcoin, with block
header containing essential parameters such as
height, parent hash and Merkle tree root. As for
communication, TAU uses node based, peer-to-peer
best-effort broadcast and transaction pool.