From Wikipedia (I can't link this link because it has parentheses in it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalanche_(protocol), and we don't currently support parens in links):
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"The protocol was anonymously introduced on IPFS on May 16, 2018...
The protocol has four basic interrelated mechanisms that compose structural support of the consensus tool. These four mechanisms are Slush, Snowflake, Snowball, and Avalanche. By using randomized sampling and metastability to ascertain and persist transactions, It represents a new protocol family. Although the original paper focused on a single protocol, namely Avalanche, it implicitly introduced a broad spectrum of voting-based, or quorum-based consensus protocols, called the Snow family."
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Whaaaaat?! What? A human being solved all quorum based systems by conceiving a network algorithm thing whose concepts are based on various configurations of frozen water and metastability (metastability is supposedly a negative aspect of electronic systems due to multiple clock domains).
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