107Course · Foundation
Consensus
How independent parties agree on truth.
How independent parties agree on truth without a trusted party. The course walks from FLP impossibility through Nakamoto consensus to PoS and BFT, treating each as an institutional design with tradeoffs.
- 01
Distinguish crash-fault from Byzantine-fault tolerance.
- 02
Explain Nakamoto consensus.
- 03
Compare PoW, PoS, and BFT families.
Prerequisites
- — Distributed Systems and Cryptography Foundations, ideally read in parallel.
Pacing
~4 hours.
- IModule
The problem
Faults, and what to tolerate.
- IIModule
The families
PoW, PoS, BFT.
A Note from the Faculty
A protocol's consensus algorithm is its constitution.