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So I am trying to wrap my head around Proof of History and how it is used in Solana.

I am reading the white paper. https://solana.com/solana-whitepaper.pdf

And so far I think I get the general idea of it. An iterative hashing, which produces intermediate hash (that can be indexed) that is then fed into the hashing etc.

The fact that each step of the iterative hashing with the index is kept makes it possible to verify this iterative hashing faster than the actual production.

All these is good.

The part I start loosing it is when it starts talking about Timestamp for Events and how does this fits into the mechanism for building and verifying blocks and also for leader selection.

For example in the paper i read:

The Leader sequences user messages and orders them such that they can be efficiently processed by other nodes in the system, maximizing throughput.

I understand the proof of history, but here I do not get how that factor or can be used to "sequences user messages and orders them"

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I think the missing bit is that user messages (transactions) are periodically mixed in with the proof-of-history hash, so that a validator can only produce a correct final proof-of-history hash if it has the user transactions in the correct place within the proof-of-history chain.

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  • By mixed in, does this mean poh-hash1 -> tx-hash -> poh-hash2 or poh-hash1 -> join(tx-hash, poh-hash2) -> poh-hash3
    – Finlay Weber
    Commented Jun 15 at 7:05
  • I can't remember which of the two it is, but yes
    – Jon C
    Commented Jun 16 at 18:31

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