The 'right answer' is going to be Paxos and it's many flavors; a few references to Lamport, Google's Chubby, "Paxos Made Real". If the right people are on hn today you're going to get a few references ZAB (Zookeeper Atomic Broadcast) and View-Stampted Replication. Oh, and go watch all of Heidi Howard's talks.
The problem spaces of byzantine and non-byzantine consensus are far enough apart ... well kinda like Atomicity in postgres and atomics is C++. You decide if that's a lot.
I’m the biggest cryptocurrency hater there is but even I admit that, despite being mostly useless in the real world for any purpose other than committing crimes, Bitcoin solved a class of consensus problem that hadn’t been solved before and is therefore a major academic achievement. My GP probably shouldn’t have been downvoted.
I agree completely! I always joke that the block and chain part of "blockchain" are boring: that's basically git! The cool part is byzantine consensus!
But like I said, I also think that as a class of problems — byzantine consensus is just super different from the normal consensus problems paxos and raft are addressing. Way more than they might seem at first. Enough to be an off-topic to the point of just being naive or misleading.
The 'right answer' is going to be Paxos and it's many flavors; a few references to Lamport, Google's Chubby, "Paxos Made Real". If the right people are on hn today you're going to get a few references ZAB (Zookeeper Atomic Broadcast) and View-Stampted Replication. Oh, and go watch all of Heidi Howard's talks.
The problem spaces of byzantine and non-byzantine consensus are far enough apart ... well kinda like Atomicity in postgres and atomics is C++. You decide if that's a lot.