The FLP Paper

Our next paper is "Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process" by Fischer, Lynch, and Paterson. This paper is considered foundational for blockchain and modern distributed architectures.

The consensus problem involves an asynchronous system of processes, some of which may be unreliable. The problem is for the reliable processes to agree on a binary value. In this paper, it is shown that every protocol for this problem has the possibility of non-termination, even with only one faulty process. By way of contrast, solutions are known for the synchronous case, the “Byzantine Generals” problem.

Link: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/tds/papers/Lynch/jacm85.pdf

Afterwards we'll socialize with a drink and a bite somewhere nearby.

We will let you in so please arrive on time.