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Are we there yet? Do we need paxos-like consensus protocols? Hardware is becoming cheaper and commoditised and with all the hype around blockchain, it looks lik

Are we there yet? Do we need paxos-like consensus protocols? Hardware is becoming cheaper and commoditised and with all the hype around blockchain, it looks like people are ready to pay extra for the redundant hardware needed for 100% fault tolerance. Still, it feels to me to in almost all cases, including financial transactions, it's good enough to be right 99.999% of the time and just amortise the costs of the very rare bit flip...

fnord123 9y ago
>Do we need paxos-like consensus protocols? ...yes.
matthelb 9y ago
You bring up a good point, although I'm not sure if I agree with (or understand) the premises. I can't imagine a world where hardware and the protocols running on top will be immune to physical sources of faults, such as natural disasters, human intervention, or cosmic radiation(!). As a result, dealing with failures will always be a consideration in building distributed software systems, and Paxos or protocols that solve the same problem as Paxos will always be relevant. I do think you make a good point that we don't always need Paxos-like protocols. Paxos is a very strong tool, so it solves a difficult problem, but is heavy-handed in many scenarios. There is a lot of space to explore lighter-weight alternatives to Paxos while still providing similarly strong properties.