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tendermint/docs/specification/new-spec/bft-time.md

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BFT time in Tendermint

Tendermint provides a deterministic, Byzantine fault-tolerant, source of time. Time in Tendermint is defined with the Time field of the block header.

It satisfies the following properties:

  • Time Monotonicity: Time is monotonically increasing, i.e., given a header H1 for height h1 and a header H2 for height h2 = h1 + 1, H1.Time < H2.Time.
  • Time Validity: Given a set of Commit votes that forms the block.LastCommit field, a range of valid values for the Time field of the block header is defined only by
    Precommit messages (from the LastCommit field) sent by correct processes, i.e., a faulty process cannot arbitrarily increase the Time value.

In the context of Tendermint, time is of type int64 and denotes UNIX time in milliseconds, i.e., corresponds to the number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970. Before defining rules that need to be enforced by the Tendermint consensus protocol, so the properties above holds, we introduce the following definition:

  • median of a set of Vote messages is equal to the median of Vote.Time fields of the corresponding Vote messages

We ensure Time Monotonicity and Time Validity properties by the following rules:

  • let rs denotes RoundState (consensus internal state) of some process. Then rs.ProposalBlock.Header.Time == median(rs.LastCommit) && rs.Proposal.Timestamp == rs.ProposalBlock.Header.Time.

  • Furthermore, when creating the vote message, the following rules for determining vote.Time field should hold:

    • if rs.Proposal is defined then vote.Time = max(rs.Proposal.Timestamp + 1, time.Now()), where time.Now() denotes local Unix time in milliseconds.

    • if rs.Proposal is not defined and rs.Votes contains +2/3 of the corresponding vote messages (votes for the current height and round, and with the corresponding type (Prevote or Precommit)), then

    vote.Time = max(median(getVotes(rs.Votes, vote.Height, vote.Round, vote.Type)), time.Now()),

    where getVotes function returns the votes for particular Height, Round and Type.
    The second rule is relevant for the case when a process jumps to a higher round upon receiving +2/3 votes for a higher round, but the corresponding Proposal message for the higher round hasn't been received yet.