This article explains how Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) builds on Lamport’s theoretical consensus algorithms by introducing leaders, quorums, and cryptographic optimizations to make Byzantine consensus practical, contrasts it with Paxos and crash-fault tolerance, and explores its influence on modern blockchain protocols.

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Recently, I delivered a culture talk on Scalien, my old database startup that never took off. I discussed the business, product and some technical challenges and lessons learned from developing ScalienDB, a Paxos-based distributed NoSQL database.

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