(Before you down vote: I have a PhD in distributed systems and fault tolerance. Okay, now you can down vote for the duchebaggery of this prescript)<p>I think a fundamental and very underrated paper and concept (which actually predates Paxos, yet Lamport ignored or was unaware of) is the notion of randomized consensus protocols. Simpler than &quot;structured&quot; leader type algorithms. Believe Ben Or&#x27;s algorithm was first.