Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process.

Fischer, M. J., Lynch, N. A., & Paterson, M. S. (1985). Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process. Journal of the ACM, 32(2), 374-382.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1985

DOI

10.1145/3149.214121

Link

https://doi.org/10.1145/3149.214121

Cited from

computer_science, economics_finance, synthesized

Cited by

3 citations across 3 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Consensus
  • The impossibility of deterministic agreement in a fully asynchronous network with even one faulty participant, the threshold below which adversarial participants can be tolerated, and the requirement that any two deciding quorums intersect are not facts about software but facts about the trade-space itself, and they bound what any protocol in any substrate can hope to achieve.

    This sourceProves no deterministic protocol guarantees consensus in an asynchronous system with even one crash failure (the FLP impossibility).

• Social Choice
  • Sports scoring: figure skating, gymnastics, and diving aggregate judge scores by rules (drop high/low, sum, median) whose bias properties are the strategyproofness literature. Distributed-systems consensus: Paxos, Raft, and BFT aggregate node "votes" into one agreed state, and the FLP impossibility is the consensus analogue of social-choice impossibility.

    This sourceThe FLP impossibility — no deterministic asynchronous protocol guarantees consensus with even one faulty process — the distributed-systems analogue of social-choice impossibility.

• Trilemma
  • The World Energy Council's energy trilemma (low-carbon, reliable, affordable) frames national electricity-system design; the triple bottom line treats economic, social, and environmental objectives as a forced-choice geometry; and the FLP impossibility (fault-tolerant consensus, full asynchrony, deterministic termination) is the trilemma of distributed agreement.

    This sourceProves the FLP impossibility — no deterministic protocol guarantees consensus in an asynchronous system with one faulty process.

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