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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This article, following Lamport's work, extends the original Byzantine Generals algorithm from “oral-messages” to signed messages, showing how digital signatures drastically simplify the problem and reduce message complexity, with an implementation given in Python using Flask HTTP nodes.

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