Design distributed consensus algorithms

Prove consensus impossibility, design quorum systems, pick protocols

Replicating state machines, electing leaders, and ensuring split-brain safety without blockchain.

• · Failure model (crash, Byzantine), fault tolerance target, latency budget

• · Consensus protocol (Paxos, Raft, VR), quorum config, TLA+ spec

• · Understand FLP impossibility
• · Know Lamport/vector clocks
• · Partial-synchrony vs async distinction

• · Ignoring FLP → timeout-dependent correctness
• · Split-brain with wrong quorum size
• · Stale state after crash recovery without write-ahead logs

• · Tibsfox, stable 2026-04-12
• · Covers Paxos, Raft, Viewstamped Replication, TLA+ style