consensus

Weekly Paper Notes — 🔁 Seminal Paper of the Week for the 2026-07-25 CS paper digest. Area: Distributed Computing. Authors: Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak, Marshall Pease (SRI International) Venue: ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, Vol. 4, No. 3, July 1982, pp. 382–401. DOI: 10.1145/357172.357176 · PDF (SRI copy) Why the paper still matters Almost every distributed system in production today — Spanner, etcd, ZooKeeper, Kafka, every blockchain, every consensus protocol with a Greek letter in its name — is a descendant of the impossibility and possibility results in this 20-page paper....

Original: Leslie Lamport, Paxos Made Simple, ACM SIGACT News 32(4), December 2001. Canonical PDF: lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/paxos-simple.pdf Predecessor: The Part-Time Parliament, ACM TOCS 16(2), 1998 (the “island of Paxos” allegory that nobody could read). Why “made simple” Lamport originally described his consensus algorithm in 1998 in The Part-Time Parliament, a paper framed as archaeological reconstruction of the parliamentary procedures of an ancient Greek island. It was a joke. It was also, by broad consensus (pun deliberate), unreadable — reviewers hated it, adoption was near zero for years, and even engineers who wanted to build on it complained they couldn’t....

Weekly Paper Notes — Seminal Paper of the Week for the 2026-07-11 CS paper digest. Area: Distributed Computing / Coordination. Author: Mike Burrows (Google) Venue: OSDI ‘06 — The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems Canonical link: OSDI ‘06 proceedings · PDF Why the paper still matters Twenty years after publication, Chubby is the paper you can point at to explain almost every coordination system in the modern datacenter....

arXiv: 2607.02275 · PDF: pdf · Published: 2026-07-02 TL;DR Cadence is a Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocol that finalizes blocks at arbitrarily low block intervals by running each slot as an independent consensus instance — no slot waits for its predecessor to finish or propagate. It also drops the single-leader model in favor of multiple concurrent proposers (MCP) per slot, giving short-term censorship resistance and “hiding” (a proposer can’t craft its proposal in reaction to others’)....

Weekly Paper Notes — Seminal Paper of the Week for the 2026-06-27 CS paper digest. Area: Distributed Computing. Author: Satoshi Nakamoto Published: October 31, 2008 (cryptography mailing list) Canonical URL: bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf This week’s digest had a fresh paper on transaction-fair ordering on DAGs without weak edges (Tilikum, 2606.27250) — a piece of work whose entire problem statement (DeFi, BEV, reordering attacks) only exists because of one nine-page document published seventeen-and-a-half years ago to a small cryptography mailing list....