What’s the difference between attestation and finality?
When describing attestation, the ethereum.org website says:
"If a validator isn't chosen to propose a new shard block, they'll have to attest to another validator's proposal and confirm that everything looks as it should. It's the attestation that is recorded in the beacon chain, rather than the transaction itself.
At least 128 validators are required to attest to each shard block – this is known as a "committee"."
When describing finality it says:
"In distributed networks, a transaction has "finality" when it's part of a block that can't change.
To do this in proof-of-stake, Casper, a finality protocol, gets validators to agree on the state of a block at certain checkpoints. So long as 2/3 of the validators agree, the block is finalised. Validators will lose their entire stake if they try and revert this later on via a 51% attack."
source: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms/pos/
What is the difference between the two? Is it that attestation is done on the shard chain level (attesting to a shard block) and that finality is done at the global block level, coordinated by the beacon chain?
submitted by /u/geoffbezos
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