Draft the Consensus Whitepaper

[geo2a]

Closes #1363

[abailly]

Would be great if we avoided LaTeX IMO: we want to publish this at least on the web, and make it straightforward to use for various people. Markdown is just fine, it's simple, it supports simple diagrams and even math equations out of the box and we can always use pandoc to get a PDF if we want.

[geo2a]

@abailly sounds good, I'll convert to Markdown!

[nfrisby]

Rendered: https://github.com/IntersectMBO/ouroboros-consensus/blob/geo2a/issue-1363-consensus-whitepaper/docs/website/contents/for-developers/Whitepaper.md

[ch1bo]

@geo2a This is coming together well!

As this seems to be fairly independent of the concrete implementation, would you be interested in contributing this to https://github.com/cardano-scaling/cardano-blueprint?

It could serve as a perfect starting point for conversations with other implementers of Cardano consensus in other languages (cc @abailly, @michele-nuzzi), where together we could make it an implementation-independent asset for how the consensus on Cardano works. Of course we would need to add more fidelity and detail (while discussing what is really implementation specific or not?) over time, but I see it as an ongoing collaborative effort of multiple people.

[geo2a]

Thanks @ch1bo! I would like to stress that this is indeed a team effort of Consensus and I'm just the person stitching it all together 😄

Regarding contributing to https://github.com/cardano-scaling/cardano-blueprint --- yes, this is the plan. I'll touch up on this draft a little more today and open a PR! We can then close this one and continue the collaboration in the cardano-blueprint repo where it has wider reach.

[geo2a]

Superseded by cardano-scaling/cardano-blueprint#7