Re:Cloudflare Meerkat - Globally distributed consensus
by inigyou on Wednesday July 08, 2026 @02:41PM
(#48835720)
Wasn't there an impossibility proof for consensus without timeouts? At the boundary between a consensus failure and success, there must be a certain message that, if you delay it enough, causes a consensus failure, and that implies either you wait forever for that message (deadlock) or you eventually give up waiting (timeout).
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Re:Cloudflare Meerkat - Globally distributed consensus
by nano_o on Wednesday July 08, 2026 @03:16PM
(#48836208)
It's impossible to do it deterministically (that's the famous FLP impossibility result), but if you accept to have liveness only with probability 1 then it's possible (for example, an early randomized asynchronous protocol is Ben-Or's protocol from 1983).