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consensus is strongly related to distributed computing fault tolerance and database or file systems' atomicity and integrity in case of crash. Basically problem

• killerstorm 4y ago
  Distributed computing research is focused mostly on increasing throughout, reducing latency and enabling parallelism and concurrency. OTOH cryptocurrency consensus is mostly about answering a question: "How do we prevent bad guys from stealing money or doing other nasty things?" While a concept of Byzantine Fault Tolerance was known before Bitcoin, it was never really applied in practice AFAIK - people thought it's overkill. Also I'd say doing it within a private network is one thing, and doing it with random weirdos on internet is completely different. Distributed computing researchers like Lamport were considering models where e.g. up to 30% of nodes are compromised, that won't work on internet where an attacker can potentially simulate billions of fake nodes. Nakamoto consensus is really elegant as it combines Sybil protection, incentivization and consensus into one thing.