Society · Coordination
Consensus
Distributed agreement process
Definition
Mechanism
A distributed protocol allowing a set of agents to agree on a single data value or state transition. It orchestrates Vote exchange and uses Quorum to validate the result. It ensures safety and liveness in an adversarial network, accepting a Proposal and yielding a Value.
Preconditions
- Group of agents is defined (Membership List)
- Communication channel is available
- Proposal received
Postconditions
Invariants
Risks
Failure modes
Split Brain
Network partition causes two subgroups to reach different Values.
Liveness Failure
The system stalls and never reaches agreement on the Proposal.
Sybil Attack
One malicious actor creates multiple identities to sway the Vote.
Byzantine Failure
Agents lying or acting maliciously to prevent consensus.
Caution
Governance decisions susceptible to coordinated voting blocs.
Relationships
Builds on
Accepts
Infrastructure
A suggested course of action
Composes with
Yields
Infrastructure
A measure of utility
Used by
References
Emergency state checkpointing
Discovering existing agreement
Reference