Lamport's early Paxos papers are interesting for a lot of reasons (I particularly like his simple textbook definition of equivalence classes in "Generalized Con

Lamport's early Paxos papers are interesting for a lot of reasons (I particularly like his simple textbook definition of equivalence classes in "Generalized Consensus and Paxos" (2005)), but I agree that the Paxos algorithm gets lost in all the fluff. In 2016 some researchers at Stony Brook published the full (Multi-) Paxos algorithm using TLA+, including a couple of nice extras: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.01387 https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.01387 The spec is succinct enough to commit to memory and way easier to comprehend than Lamport's prose descriptions (Lamport has never specified the Paxos algorithm in TLA+, although you can find his TLA+ spec for Paxos consensus). The paper also includes a mechanically checked proof and an interesting overview of other related work.