Subject
5 entries
Consensus
Bookmarks
Distributed Consensus Reading List
Heidi Howard's curated list of papers on distributed consensus — organized from foundational Paxos through Multi-Paxos, Raft, flexible quorums, and Byzantine fault tolerance. The definitive paper trail for understanding how consensus algorithms actually work.
Notes on Theory of Distributed Systems
James Aspnes's freely-distributed lecture notes on the theory of distributed systems, covering fault tolerance, consensus, synchrony models, and randomized algorithms. A rigorous but accessible graduate reference that grounds distributed computing in formal models.
Proof of Useful Work: Blockchain Web Services
A 2022 technical whitepaper proposing Proof of Useful Work (PoUW) as an alternative to Bitcoin's proof-of-work, directing miners' computation toward paying clients' ML training jobs and scientific simulations instead of purposeless hash puzzles. A direct response to the energy waste criticism of PoW mining.
Proof of Learning (PoLe): Blockchain Consensus via Neural Network Training
Proof of Learning (PoLe) repurposes the computation wasted on Proof-of-Work consensus by directing it toward training neural networks, making blockchain nodes useful ML workers. The cheating-prevention mechanism (Secure Mapping Layer) is the interesting technical contribution — a linear layer baked into the network architecture that makes it costly to fake training progress.
Distributed Systems for Fun and Profit
Mixu's free online book on distributed systems fundamentals — covering consistency models, CAP theorem, replication, and consensus — written for practitioners who want theoretical grounding without the academic overhead. One of the clearest introductions to the field that exists.