Finality

Finality ensures that previous transactions remain unchangeable.

In present-day blockchain systems, transactions are commonly seen as immutable. However, the majority of these systems only provide a type of probabilistic transaction finality, indicating that transactions aren't immediately treated as final, but eventually gain that status. Consequently, it is recommended that one waits for up to 6 confirmations when transacting on the Bitcoin blockchain. Finality is the main reason bridge-ins for Botanix will take 6 confirmations before being processed.

Why is Finality so important?

Finality estimates the wait time for a reliable assurance that a transaction inscribed in the blockchain is unalterable, meaning it won't be disregarded. This holds paramount importance for businesses, as even an hour's delay on a blockchain network can yield noteworthy consequences.

Finality: hard to solve in PoS but inherent to PoW

See the sections on Finality in a Proof-of-Work and Finality in a Proof-of-Stake on how the two different consensus mechanisms reach finality.

From a general perspective finality is inherently part of the design in PoW while PoS has to design a new protocol (eg. Casper in Ethereum) to achieve finality. This new finality protocol comes with tradeoffs and new attack surfaces. Arguably finality is one of the biggest security problems of a Layer 1 PoS protocol. Stacks has realized the issues of finality in PoS and therefore was the first to use a PoW protocol (Bitcoin) to achieve this finality.

Likewise, the Botanix EVM as a PoS inherits finality from Bitcoin's PoW and does not need to implement a new protocol to achieve finality.