Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process

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Michael J. Fischer, Nancy A. Lynch, Michael S. Paterson
Journal of the ACM (JACM) 32(2), pages 374–382
April 1985

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 nontermination, even with only one faulty process. By way of contrast, solutions are known for the synchronous case, the “Byzantine Generals” problem.

journal or series
book Journal of the ACM (JACM)