&quot;When used as a failure detector, timeouts are just a guess that something is wrong. (If they could, distributed algorithms would do without clocks entirely, but then consensus becomes impossible [10].&quot;<p>Having just re-read Lynch&#x27;s paper, can you explain what you mean here? I didn&#x27;t see anything explicitly relying on time. It could be there is some implicit usage I didnt see. Additionally, the paper&#x27;s impossibility result is about &quot;perfectly correct consensus&quot; which applies with and without clocks and then has a positive result for &quot;partially correct consensus&quot; (i.e. not deciding a value is a correct result). Im not sure which you mean when you say &quot;consensus becomes impossible&quot; as it is either already impossible (the perfectly correct protocol) with one faulty process or (to my understanding) not dependent on time (the partially correct protocol).<p>p.s. great article!