Agreement without a king

Every blockchain answers one question: how do strangers agree on the next page of the ledger?

• Proof-of-Work answers with electricity — whoever burns the most, writes.
• Proof-of-Stake answers with locked capital — whoever stakes the most, writes.
• Stellar answers with trust: every node names the nodes it believes, and agreement ripples through those declarations. No mining, no staking — the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP).

The result: ledgers close in ~5 seconds, fees cost fractions of a cent, and the network runs on machines a university can afford.